I have used Vim regularly since at least the mid-1990s, on nearly every platform I’ve used, and consider it an essential tool and an excellent work of software. Bram Moolenaar, its creator, passed away on August 3, as announced several days ago by his family.
I have multiple other text editors and IDEs running right now, and they’re all good at what they do. But Vim’s also running; it’s always running, and there’s always a Vim window somewhere on my desktops. It can do hard jobs well and simple jobs quickly and pretty much everything in between. It has a vast built-in command set, much of which is burned deep into my muscle memory, it’s configurable, extensible, and scriptable (if not with the loveliest of languages), it’s completely reliable, and it’s blisteringly fast.
It would be hard to build and shepherd a project like this for any amount of time, and Bram did it for decades. All he asked for in return was that we consider donating to help orphans. I made a donation this week; it felt tiny compared to all the years of use I’ve gotten from his work.