This is a really excellent writeup. It's light on technical details, exploring much more the motivations behind why things have evolved the way they have. But, Bram does show the project file layout with brief descriptions of what each file contains, pertaining to Vim. Very good. Informative, interesting and maybe even a little motivational.

It's interesting that in 2002 he wasn't using any revision control at all. Was that common for open source projects at the time?

Linux kernel development was managed with tarballs and patches for the first 10 years, until BitKeeper was selected in 2002, then of course Git in 2005.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Revision_control Also see Linus Torvalds' Google Tech Talk on Git starting around 2:45 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

"powered by GNU Emacs" is a funny endpage note

"In November 1998 an survey was held to allow Vim users to vote for changes to Vim. This resulted in a good overview of what users wanted to be added. This is the top six:"

  1. Add folding (display only a selected part of the text)
  2. Vertically split windows (side-by-side)
  3. Add configurable auto-indenting for many languages (like 'cindent')
  4. Fix all problems, big and small; make Vim more robust
  5. Add Perl compatible search pattern
  6. Search patterns that cross line boundaries

Compare that to the top 6 most requested features today:

  1. add IDE features (debugger integration, shell window)
  2. add integration with Python instead of inventing more Vim script
  3. improve diff mode: automatic refresh, better merge support
  4. fix all problems, big and small; make Vim more robust
  5. improve syntax highlighting speed
  6. add an indication what text was changed since editing started (change bar or diff)

From:

http://www.vim.org/sponsor/vote_results.php

Shame on me, I use Vim everyday and I didn't even know it was Charityware.

It's even on the splash screen. Every time you open vim you can see Help poor children in Uganda! or something similar.

I guess grandparent usually does "vim <something>" or uses scripts that clear the buffer (such as opening NERDTree on the current dir) which effectively make the splash screen never appear.

Right, I doubt most of us see the splash screen that often -- I almost always have a filename in mind when I first open vim.

I'm not surprised that he didn't notice. People become conditioned to ignore repetitive information.

Point of note: this discussion is about a decade old (coming right after vim 6 came out -- we're now on vim 7.x).

Last modified: Jan 15, 2002 according to the footer on the page.

I wish you could add your own custom icons...without recompiling. Other than that, love Vim!