Drew DeVault of SourceHut fame has shipped the first release of his Vim 8.2-based fork.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
By Sourav Rudra<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A Vim fork has arrived, and it exists because of AI. Drew DeVault<\/a>, the developer behind SourceHut, announced Vim Classic back in March 2026<\/a> after becoming unhappy with the direction both Vim<\/a> and NeoVim<\/a> were heading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His gripe was that generative AI had started creeping into their development, and he wanted no part of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The NeoVim side of that concern is the project’s labeling of AI-assisted pull requests as “AI assisted \ud83e\udd16<\/em><\/a>,” which has now stacked up a fair number of requests, many of which have already been merged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With Vim, the situation is a bit murky. Drew points to a GitHub issue<\/a> where community members suspected one contributor of using LLMs, but a Vim maintainer had already pushed back on those accusations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyhow, Vim Classic<\/a> has received its first-ever release<\/a>, so let’s see what it has to offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Drew warns that Vim Classic is meant for early adopters. Not for people looking to daily drive it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Based on Vim 8.2.0148<\/a>, Vim Classic predates the Vim9 script<\/a> entirely. This was done deliberately to keep the maintenance burden manageable, stopping at the last patch before the script was introduced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a result, some Vim plugins that rely on Vim9 Script will not work with Vim Classic.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n From that base, select patches have been backported from upstream<\/strong>, mostly addressing CVEs discovered after 8.2, alongside some bug fixes and original patches to keep things building on modern toolchains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n DeVault is also upfront that not every applicable security patch has been confirmed as backported, so some CVEs may have slipped through<\/strong>. The project is currently recommended only for early adopters comfortable with that uncertainty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition, the charityware model carries over from Vim<\/strong>, with this project continuing to support the children of Uganda (albeit via a different charity<\/em>) that Bram Moolenaar<\/a>, the creator of Vim, endorsed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The original ICCF Holland<\/a> charity was dissolved following his passing, with its mission carried forward by Kuwasha<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vim Classic 8.3 is currently available as a source tarball from SourceHut<\/a> (direct download<\/em>). You will also find the release tarball and its PGP signature, signed with DeVault’s public key, up on the project’s refs page<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA classic Vim experience<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"cropped](\"https:\/\/itsfoss.com\/content\/images\/2026\/06\/vim-classic-website.png\")
<\/a>The packages<\/h2>\n\n\n\n