Vim Classic 8.3 Launched as an AI-Free Vim Fork (linuxiac.com) 57
This month saw the release of Vim Classic 8.3, the first stable version of a new long-term support fork of Vim maintained without generative AI tools. Linuxiac reports:
The release is based on Vim 8.2.0148 and includes selected bug fixes and patches backported from later upstream Vim releases. Vim Classic was first announced by [SourceHut's CEO/founder] Drew DeVault in March 2026 after he objected to LLM-assisted development in Vim and Neovim. In his announcement, DeVault said he no longer wanted to use software developed with LLM assistance and introduced Vim Classic as a fork for users who want to continue using Vim without that involvement... Vim Classic follows Vim's charityware model and continues to direct users toward Bram Moolenaar's long-running support for children in Uganda. The release is distributed as a signed source tarball from SourceHut, while future important announcements are expected through the project's mailing list.
"Vim is important to me..." DeVault wrote in March. (DeVault even tattooed "hjkl" on his right arm.) "[A]lmost every word I have ever committed to posterity, through this blog, in my code, all of the docs I've written, emails I've sent, and more, almost all of it has passed through Vim."
But DeVault wrote that he also cares about AI's impact on air pollution, fresh water supplies, global supply chains, and the working conditions of miners in African companies: And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world's total energy production in order to eliminate jobs and replace them with a robot that lies... All this to enrich the few, centralize power, reduce competition, and underwrite an enormous bubble that, once it bursts, will ruin the lives of millions of the world's poor and marginalized classes.
I don't think it's cute that someone vibe coded "battleship" in VimScript. I think it's more important that we stop collectively pretending that we don't understand how awful all of this is. I don't want to use software which has slop in it. I do what I can to avoid it, and sadly even Vim now comes under scrutiny in that effort as both Vim and NeoVim are relying on LLMs to develop the software... To keep my conscience clear, and continue to enjoy the relationship I have with this amazing piece of software, I have forked Vim...
Since forking from this base, I have backported a handful of patches, most of which address CVEs discovered after this release, but others which address minor bug fixes. I also penned a handful of original patches which bring the codebase from this time up to snuff for building it on newer toolchains...
I invite you to use Vim Classic, if you feel the same way as me, and to maintain it with me, contributing the patches you need to support your own use cases.
"Vim is important to me..." DeVault wrote in March. (DeVault even tattooed "hjkl" on his right arm.) "[A]lmost every word I have ever committed to posterity, through this blog, in my code, all of the docs I've written, emails I've sent, and more, almost all of it has passed through Vim."
But DeVault wrote that he also cares about AI's impact on air pollution, fresh water supplies, global supply chains, and the working conditions of miners in African companies: And at a moment when the climate demands immediate action to reduce our footprint on this planet, the AI boom is driving data centers to consume a full 1.5% of the world's total energy production in order to eliminate jobs and replace them with a robot that lies... All this to enrich the few, centralize power, reduce competition, and underwrite an enormous bubble that, once it bursts, will ruin the lives of millions of the world's poor and marginalized classes.
I don't think it's cute that someone vibe coded "battleship" in VimScript. I think it's more important that we stop collectively pretending that we don't understand how awful all of this is. I don't want to use software which has slop in it. I do what I can to avoid it, and sadly even Vim now comes under scrutiny in that effort as both Vim and NeoVim are relying on LLMs to develop the software... To keep my conscience clear, and continue to enjoy the relationship I have with this amazing piece of software, I have forked Vim...
Since forking from this base, I have backported a handful of patches, most of which address CVEs discovered after this release, but others which address minor bug fixes. I also penned a handful of original patches which bring the codebase from this time up to snuff for building it on newer toolchains...
I invite you to use Vim Classic, if you feel the same way as me, and to maintain it with me, contributing the patches you need to support your own use cases.
How a compiler differs from an LLM (Score:5, Informative)
His hand written "artisan" code is being turned into machine code by a computer anyway.
A compiler is a deterministic process that runs locally on a modest home computer in reasonable time without needing an expensive NVIDIA GPU, doesn't regurgitate memorized copyrighted code from its training set, and doesn't boil the oceans in a datacenter for training plus use.
Re: How a compiler differs from an LLM (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Read about reproducible builds and how hard it is to achieve them. I think Debian is making good progress, but that took a long time.
Re: (Score:2)
just turning off the stochastic sampling when they want deterministic output
How long can you trust that the operator of the server offering a particular LLM wll let you continue to choose a seed?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Just because you're not given the controls [the random seed used to process an LLM prompt] doesn't mean they do not exist.
I'll have to disagree with you on that. What matters for reproducible builds [reproducible-builds.org] is that the person performing the build has power to set the seed.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Remove the "has to know" parts and you no longer have a vi. That's not bad, but the non-vi editors already exist. Why change a vi into a not-vi instead of using one of the many editors that are designed for learning them fast?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: That won't age well (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It's about the development of vim itself.
vim has no sharp edges because it's small. VSC on the other hand has LOTS.
Re: (Score:2)
"AI free" meant as quality seal will soon mean
Predictions of the future are meaningless when applied to the present.
Re: (Score:2)
It's also ridiculously shortsighted. AI tools are great for some things, not so great for others. Most of the issues I would say are now largely process based. Legitimate bug reports/fixes are fine, so long as they have been reviewed by someone and the "bug" actually exists and isn't just hallucinated garbage. Also using LLMs as a targeted coding aid for an existing/competent developer using it as an extension of their own workflow should not really be an issue. Where the big issue and the massive waste of
Re: (Score:2)
And honestly, I don't know why I would want to go back to vim 8 (so circa December 2019 for his fork.)
He's 6.5 years in the past just to avoid "AI". What a dweeb.
Say (Score:3)
Is there a list of other text editors that don't have AI ?
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know about a list but Emacs just adopted a no-AI position.
On a wider level, Open Slopware [codeberg.org] is the site to check if you're about to adopt an application and would like to ensure the modifications being made to it are by humans. Be aware the maintainers have been harassed multiple times by AI addicts so... keep tracking the discussions and be prepared in future to have to DDG "OpenSlopware" to find the latest version.
Re: (Score:2)
Emacs just adopted a no-AI position
Emacs rejected having another feature??? FFS, it's the original bloatware. It took decades for Eclipse to come around and supplant it as far as code editors go. Maybe ^a^i was already taken for some other function. So now emacs has everything but the kitchen sink and AI.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
OK guys, I think it's pretty obvious in context we're talking about generative AI here? Eliza (and Lisp) are not examples of that. AI had a very broad meaning once, from expert systems to neural nets, but right now it's pretty much exclusively being used to refer to generative AI.
Secondly, even if we weren't, the Emacs position is about maintenance of its code base. It does not want "AI" code contributions, falling into the same category as the maintainers of Open Slopware's domain.
Re: Say (Score:2)
Emacs!
Even AI can't figure out how to count the parentheses in lisp!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Nano.
Different tools for different skills (Score:4, Interesting)
I have talents and handicaps
When I took my first programming class, I learned faster and deeper than any of the other students.
Evidently, I have a strong talent for code.
I can't touch type. I tried to learn and failed. I also failed to learn to play the piano.
If I was forced to use vi, I would have failed as a software engineer.
But, with an IDE, I have done very well over a 40+ year career.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: Different tools for different skills (Score:3)
Learning vi is about on the level of learning Roman numerals. It's not difficult, but you're also not missing much.
Re: Different tools for different skills (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Learning vi is about on the level of learning Roman numerals. It's not difficult, but you're also not missing much.
So, it's six?
Re: (Score:1)
I also failed abysmally at touch-typing: I'd been using a keyboard for too long by the time I gave it a shot.
I first used (n)vi(m) when working on telephony middleware as a support engineer/web developer, because UNIX and editor of choice in my workplace; after a few weeks my fingers "got it", and I (and my two-and-two-halves fingers) never looked back.
When subsequently working in VBA (the only available platform in that environment), I so missed the speed and facility afforded by vim.
Re:Different tools for different skills (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was a young college student I watched a professor working on some code in his office one day and saw how fast he was able to manipulate the text, cutting pasting, duplicating, all without hardly moving his hands. Ad hoc macros with the "." command were so powerful. I was very impressed and learned vi and never regretted it. vi definitely doesn't require touch typing! In fact I think it was designed for non-touch typers.
Now I have used vim for 30 years and am handicapped without it. I don't care if it's vim class, regular vim, neovim, or some IDE binding mode. I'm no vim expert and I really only use a small set of commands and keystrokes, but I appreciate the efficiency. The editor doesn't cause me to succeed or fail as a software engineer, but it does make my life more pleasant.
Next big thing... (Score:2)
why bother (Score:1)
Dilapidated Slashdot (Score:2)
Luddites (Score:2)
See subject
Grabage in / Garbage out, Continue using VIM. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Grabage in / Garbage out, Continue using VIM. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Most such purity-forks fail. How many distributions package the GIMP fork glimpse?
Wrong tool? (Score:2)
Ahm.. what are LLMs doing in VIM in the first place? EMACS I can understsand, that always was a kitchen sink, but it feels like a really strange thing to include in VIM itself.
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure what you're speaking about. VIM classic differs from normal VIM in that they do not use LLMs to help develop the editor itself, nor do they accept contributions from those that do. Where as the original VIM editor maintainers now use AI and LLM for bug fixing, feature developing, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, I thought they were referring to inclusion of some kind of LLM based tool right in the editor, kinda like how various full IDEs now have one built (or plugged) in.
Good for them (Score:1)
Isn't he the CP enthusiast? (Score:2)