On Feb. 21, Vim's father, Bram Moolenaar, announced in a public email that Vim's core maintainer, Sven Guckes, had died of illness in Berlin. In the email, Bram Moolenaar expressed deep condolences for the departure of Sven Guckes and announced that the Vim 9.0 version would be dedicated to this "old friend".
According to the email, Sven Guckes died in Berlin on February 20, 2022. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor in December 2021 and transferred to a hospice hospital at the end of January this year, leaving the world calmly in the company of friends and chatting and laughing.
Bram Moolenaar, who recalled the story about Sven in an email, said that although he had only met Sven a few times, he was impressed by his never-ending enthusiasm.
As a student, Sven was very active in the Vim development team back in the '90s, and the homepage vim.org he registered for the Vim project has been used to this day.
Sven, who is very passionate about Vim, wants to bring Vim to more developers, and he also proposes "What is Vim?" With this in the hope of explaining what Vim is through a 6KB file, he actively helped write a tutorial on Vim.
At the end of the email, Bram Moolenaar announced that he was dedicating the upcoming Vim 9.0 to Sven as a memento.
The story of Sven Guckes and Vim
In 1989, as a student, Sven Guckes began to formally understand the "Internet", and he quickly learned to send emails with "elm" and edit with "vi".
In 1992, someone removed Sven Guckes' settings on a college computer and added a Unixish setting. Later, when he saw the Mac IIci, he fell in love with it and bought a Mac IIvx for himself, but he found that the thing did not have an editor like "vi".
In 1994, someone introduced Vim to Sven Guckes, saying that "it's much better than Vi," and Sven Guckes thought, "Finally someone is improving Vi." ”。 So Sven Guckes thought it was worth supporting Vim, especially since he wanted to give his Mac IIvx (writing his dissertation in LaTeX) something like a "Vi."
Subsequently, Sven Guckes created a number of web pages on newsgroup comp.editors and replied to many posts about vi and vim.
It wasn't until September 15, 1997, that Sven Guckes finally registered for vim.org, and the pages created earlier became vim's homepage (www.vim.org pages were just copies of his math.fu-berlin.de pages.
Later, as Linux became popular, Sven Guckes began to use Linux, and his Mac computers were left in the corner to "eat ashes."
In 1998, Sven Guckes and his partners helped publish a book set on LaTeX, all edited using Vim.
There was a time when Sven Guckes wanted Vim to be released with all systems, and he thought Vim shouldn't be ported to Windows: "When a bad system only makes people use it for longer, rather than switching to a better system, why give it such a good tool for free?" As a result, he argues that "Windows ports will only prolong Vim's 'death' time."
The reason for this is that Sven Guckes has been using Gvim on Windows for a while, but often just for testing (and lacks a good text file viewer). He's been editing some files with Gvim, but only because the university's machine is mounting his home directory. But these can still be a bit of a hassle and take too much time. So he just installed an ssh client (TeraTerm at the time) and logged in to the SunOS machine.
By 2000, Vim didn't have a Y2K bug. The authors of Vim and developers such as Sven Guckes have also added support for "multibyte", "unicode", and "folding" to Vim-6.
From then until 2008, Sven Guckes used Vim primarily on Linux — Debian on servers and Ubuntu on laptops.
Sven Guckes has been promoting Vim almost all his life, and he has always been very concerned about updating his books on Vim with information about Vim, hoping that the content about Vim will be known and used by more users. This is also the dedication of Sven Guckes as a developer to Vim's development, which is awe-inspiring.
About Vim
Vim is the most famous text/code editor on Linux systems and an enhanced version of the early Vi editor (GVim is its Windows version).
Vim's biggest feature is that it is edited entirely using keyboard commands, and although it is difficult to get started without mouse operations, the various clever combinations of keyboard flow after getting started can bring great efficiency gains.
Because of this, Vim is very different from modern editors (such as Sublime Text), and it is not easy to learn to get started, and it needs to remember many key combinations and commands, so it is regarded as a special editor for masters and Geeks.
Vim is very configurable, with a variety of plug-ins, syntax highlighting schemes, and so on, whether it is a code editor or a document writing tool.