Vim core developer Sven Guckes dies, father of Vim: I will dedicate version 9.0 to him

On February 21st, Vim's father, Bram Moolenaar, announced in a public email that Sven Guckes, the core Vim maintainer, had died of illness in Berlin. In the email, Bram Moolenaar expressed his deep condolences for the passing of Sven Guckes, and announced that Vim 9.0 version will be dedicated to this "old friend".

According to the email, Sven Guckes died in Berlin on February 20, 2022. Diagnosed with a brain tumor in December 2021, he was transferred to a hospice at the end of January this year, and left the world peacefully surrounded by friends and chatting with laughter.

Bram Moolenaar recalled the story about Sven in the e-mail, he said that although he and Sven met only a few times, he was impressed by Sven's never-ending enthusiasm.

Back in the 1990s, Sven was very active in the Vim development team as a student, and his homepage vim.org registered for the Vim project is still in use today.

Sven, who is very enthusiastic about Vim, hopes to bring Vim to more developers, and he also proposed the idea of "What is Vim?", in order to explain to everyone what Vim is through a 6KB file, and actively help Wrote a tutorial for Vim.

At the end of the email, Bram Moolenaar announced that he would dedicate the upcoming release of Vim 9.0 to Sven as a memorial.

The Story of Sven Guckes and Vim

In 1989, the student Sven Guckes began to formally understand the "Internet", he quickly learned to use "elm" to send mail, and "vi" to edit.

In 1992, someone removed Sven Guckes' settings on the university computer and added Unixish settings. Later, when he saw the Mac IIci, he fell in love with it and bought a Mac IIvx himself, but he found that there was no editor like "vi" for this thing.

In 1994, someone introduced Vim to Sven Guckes, saying "it's much better than Vi", and Sven Guckes was thinking, "Finally someone is improving Vi.". So Sven Guckes thinks it's worth supporting Vim, especially since he wants to give his Mac IIvx (writing his thesis in LaTeX) something like "Vi".

Subsequently, Sven Guckes created some pages on newsgroup comp.editors and responded to many posts about vi and vim.

It wasn't until September 15, 1997 that Sven Guckes finally registered vim.org, and the pages created earlier became vim's home page (the page on www.vim.org was just his math.fu-berlin.de page) a copy of.

Later, as Linux became popular, Sven Guckes started using it, and his Mac was left in the corner to "eat ashes."

In 1998, Sven Guckes and colleagues helped publish a LaTeX-based book, all edited in Vim.

There was a time when Sven Guckes wanted Vim to ship with all systems, and he also argued that Vim shouldn't be ported to Windows: "When a bad system just keeps people using it longer, instead of switching to Why give it such a good tool for free when it's a better system?" Hence, he argues that "the Windows port will only prolong Vim's 'dead' time".

The reason for this is that Sven Guckes has been using Gvim on Windows for a while, but usually just for testing (and lacking 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 are still a bit cumbersome and take too much time. So he just installed an ssh client (TeraTerm at the time) and logged into the SunOS machine.

By 2000, Vim had no Y2K bugs. The authors of Vim and developers like Sven Guckes also added support for "multibyte", "unicode" and "folding" to Vim-6.

Since then until 2008, Sven Guckes has mainly used Vim 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 the book about Vim with Vim information, hoping that the content about Vim will be used by more users. This is the dedication of Sven Guckes as a developer to the development of Vim, which is awe-inspiring.

About Vim

Vim is the most famous text/code editor for Linux systems, and an enhanced version of the earlier Vi editor (GVim is its Windows version).

The biggest feature of Vim is that it is completely edited with keyboard commands. Although it is difficult to get started without mouse operation, various clever combinations of keyboard flow operations can bring about a great increase in efficiency after getting started.

Because of this, Vim is very different from modern editors (such as Sublime Text), and it is not easy to learn to get started. It needs to remember many key combinations and commands, so it is regarded as a special editor for experts and Geeks.

Vim is very configurable, with numerous plug-ins, syntax highlighting color schemes, etc. It is very powerful whether it is a code editor or a document writing tool.