One Lobsters entry this week reads like the marker of a larger trend: a long-term-support fork of Vim, with one notable line in its description of how it is built.
What it is
Vim Classic 8.3.0 is a fork of Vim 8.x for long-term maintenance — “a stable, dependable editor”. The release is based on Vim 8.2.0148, with patches conservatively backported from Vim upstream. Drew DeVault describes the idea: clean up that version and imagine an alternate history where Vim 8.3 shipped without Vim9 script.
- Source on SourceHut, tagged and signed with DeVault's PGP key.
- Three mailing lists: announce, discuss, devel. IRC `#vim-classic` on Libera.
- Still charityware: donations go to Kuwasha, continuing Bram Moolenaar's legacy.
The line that matters
The announcement reads: “a stable, long-term support fork of the ubiquitous text editor, maintained without the assistance of generative AI tools.” This is the first time I have seen an infrastructure project put not-using-AI into a release description, alongside the technical details.
It also lines up with what the AI-commit measurement found: of the 12 most-starred new repos this week, 8 had zero AI commits, and all of those are infrastructure — a kernel module, a Rust tool with three-platform CI, an exploit PoC, a TypeScript framework. Declaring “no AI” is becoming a technical property, not just an opinion.
The warning in the same announcement
What I respect most is how blunt it is about the first release's limits. The announcement says plainly that they have not evaluated **all** the thousands of patches that landed in Vim since 8.2.0148, so a security bug fixed in the last few years might reappear when you install Vim Classic. It is therefore recommended only for early adopters comfortable with a security posture that accounts for bugs they may have missed.
- If you want a stable Vim without Vim9 script and you are willing to track patches yourself: this is a reasonable choice.
- If you need complete security patches immediately: use upstream Vim, not this fork.
- If you run Vim Classic where it processes untrusted data: read the backported patch list before deploying.
Sources: Vim Classic 8.3 released, vim-classic.org, the SourceHut repo, DeVault's forking post.