The Hacker News and reddit.com/r/vim take on NeoVim is frequently that NeoVim has done tremendous harm to the overall Vim community and that the NeoVim developers aren’t respectful to Beam. Having been involved in both commubitues, I have never been able to track where that idea came from. Vim has accelerated in features drastically since 2013 and the NeoVim team often goes out of their way to speak well of Bram.

JustinMK, the main organizer these days of NeoVim has pinned this issue to increase its visibility. I’m not really fully certain what should be the most fitting tribute, but its hard to express how much impact Bram has in the world of software development through his flexible improvement to a text editor from 1975. He’s also been an excellent benevolent dictator for life over the Vim community throughout its existence and it feels like the world of open source software got just a little bit worse for his loss this week.