Drew DeVault Forked Vim at the Last Patch Before Vim9 Script to Make Vim Classic, an Editor Maintained With No Generative AI

Drew DeVault titled the post that started it “A eulogy for Vim”. He wrote it in March, mourning the editor itself, and his complaint was specific: he says “both Vim and NeoVim are relying on LLMs to develop the software.” His answer was a fork. “I don’t want to use software which has slop in it,” he wrote.

Upstream Vim does allow it, with rules. Its contributing guide says “Use of AI is allowed within the limits mentioned below,” and that “Disclosure of AI use is required, using an Assisted-by: trailer.” Big generated pull requests and AI-written commit messages are out; research and “Small, targeted fixes (e.g. for security issues)” are in.

The fork point is the clever part. “Patch 148 was the patch immediately prior to the introduction of Vim9 Script, Vim 9.0’s flagship feature,” DeVault wrote. Rewinding to it means a small crew skips years of Vim9 work it couldn’t keep up with anyway.

The 8.3.0 release notes call the result an alternate history: Vim 8.3 as if it had shipped without Vim9 script. The project backported upstream fixes conservatively, says outright that some plugins won’t work, and warns it can’t promise it caught every applicable security patch. It recommends 8.3.0 to early adopters who accept that.

DeVault told Jason Polak in an interview that “The hardest part has never been writing code, but knowing what code to write.” Polak joked about never being able to quit the editor. DeVault’s reply: “we have no intention of making it easier to exit Vim.”

Bram Moolenaar’s charity comes along too. The release notes call Vim Classic “charityware, much like Vim,” and the home page asks switchers to “Please donate to Kuwasha,” the cause Bram supported for children in Uganda.

The open seam is the backports. Vim Classic says it takes upstream fixes, and DeVault wrote that small ones “will be considered, with extra scrutiny.” Upstream’s own policy names security fixes as an acceptable place to use AI, as long as the commit says so in its trailer. How a human-only fork treats an upstream security patch carrying an Assisted-by: line is a call nobody has had to make in public yet.

Forks like this tend to multiply once one works. Expect more long-lived projects to grow a “human-maintained” sibling, and expect the fight to move to the boring middle: which upstream security fixes cross over, who reads the trailers, and whether plugin authors bother writing for two Vims. Disclosure trailers like Vim’s will probably spread for the same reason, because once AI help is labeled in a commit, anyone downstream can sort by it.