NerdNextDoor 
I've been scouring the web for peoples opinion on #EVi and I'm seeing a lot of unfair assumptions and judgement for a project forked 3 days ago.
Don't mind if I vent for a second? Please read.
🧵
We are not a startup, we have few contributors and even fewer maintainers. We are a group of volunteers trying to continue VIm without AI slop code. We barely know each other. This fork started 3 days ago, be realistic please.
We're also trying to take on a codebase that has been going for decades that only has fallen to the dark side now.
From lobste.rs to Lemmy to Hacker News, we’ve been getting shit left and right in comments for forking the project. This is not everyone however.
(https://lobste.rs/s/izprt4/evi_hard_fork_vim
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321085
https://lemmy.org/post/4418940)
This isn't a political move nor an ideological one. Not a fork out of spite. This is a fork out of preventing bad AI code that is also fucking our environment from seeping into programs we love.
We don't hate VIm, nor the lead maintainer, but we do not support their actions.
Yes, we renamed the project first. We can't also be named VIm, that causes a lot of confusion. We need to get our branding straight. You don't fork a project, wait a month after popularity and then rename it.
And yes, I take full responsibility for putting us on a bad codebase that still had AI in it, but that's hard to avoid in something like this. This goes back months, potentially years. We have however went back to a commit we believe should be clean.
Another thing I'd like to point out too, before asking us why we did this and asking about the point of a fork like this, maybe consider what AI is currently doing to the tech space right now.
Not to mention, we are on #Codeberg because we don't support GitHub's partnerships with ICE, their stance and forcing of AI, among many other things.
I've had a BlueSky user try to put me and EVi in a bad light which makes no sense because what they claim has been removed is still in the README of EVi.
The source for the BlueSky bad faith: https://mastodon.social/@diddyfo.id@bsky.brid.gy/116205822479369675
If I have anything else, I'll come back and reply to this thread. For now, I thank you all for reading, and I hope that more people understand why EVi exists.
Also, to add to this entire thread.
If it seems like we're doing nothing for hours on Codeberg, there's a high chance we're on IRC. You can find us @ #evi on irc.oftc.net!
Tom@mrmasterkeyboard Thank you for doing this! Makes me so angry all the software projects I rely on are falling to the bullshit generation slop machines.
@pertho No problem!
The Psychotic Network Ferret@mrmasterkeyboard Thank you for your efforts and best of luck to you.
patpro@mrmasterkeyboard thank you for your work. Not sure what's the future will be, but I fully support your reasons for forking Vim.
@patpro thanks! for now, we've been just seeing what we can do with the code we've been left with.
right now, it's fixing and cleaning some things and rebranding across the project to EVi.
xinit ☕ / 🗑🔥@mrmasterkeyboard BlueSky continues to not disappoint with it's Twitter emulation.
@xinit Honestly, I'm getting less and less surprised about it when I remember that "it's just BlueSky".
@mrmasterkeyboard
Exactly. Nobody's going to see it. All hail the mighty algorithm..
Exactly. Nobody's going to see it. All hail the mighty algorithm..
@xinit bend down to the holy algorithm overlords and wait for judgement to be passed to your post...
walnut 🌱@mrmasterkeyboard
bleh, how exhausting. Especially the "link to proof of the ai slop???" comments. It's plenty easy to look for yourself if they're as competent as they think they are; I strongly suspect they just want to go "I don't see the problem, this looks like a perfectly fine commit/responsible use".
bleh, how exhausting. Especially the "link to proof of the ai slop???" comments. It's plenty easy to look for yourself if they're as competent as they think they are; I strongly suspect they just want to go "I don't see the problem, this looks like a perfectly fine commit/responsible use".
@walnut yeah, but it's even more exhausting when the same thing is repeated in several other places.
not to mention, it gets worse at the end of this thread.
PointlessOne 
@mrmasterkeyboard since my comment turned out at the top (surprisingly) I feel I need to clarify that it was not so much about Evi as about news about fresh forks. I know it wasn’t you who posted it but a three days old fork is hardly newsworthy. All power to you. I’ll be glad to hear about how the fork’s going in a couple of months.
@pointlessone thanks for clearing that up, to be clear, I get what you mean about some forks that last about a day with nothing else there being a lot of fanfare about it. With EVi, me and a few other people plan to take the VIm 9.1.0 codebase and continue it further.
Bug fixes, maintenance, potential expansion of features, but our main concern is making sure we get CI and tests back up along with fixing any bugs we find. (I should make a roadmap with the others…)
@mrmasterkeyboard I hope you succeed.
BTW, NeoVim started in a similar fashion. IIRC, at first they just wanted to add Lua because they didn’t like vimscript. Ended up rewriting half the codebase and still going. But it’s a lot of work. Not every aspiring fork maintainer is ready for that.
@pointlessone thank you! We don’t plan to rewrite the codebase however (although that would be funny).
Martin Owens 
@mrmasterkeyboard @pointlessone
It's what happened to Sodipodi when it was forked into Inkscape. Rewritten from C to C++ and more besides.
Though I am disappointed you didn't call it Vie and move that E to the end. then headlines could be "Vim and Vie vie for control" 😜
@mrmasterkeyboard I don't understand why anyone should complain. ANYONE can fork the code for ANY reason, so long as it's in line with whatever licence applies to the code.
I hadn't heard about the vim troubles. I knew there were rumblings of something, but I hadn't yet looked what was up.
Thanks for taking the initiative and for raising my awareness. Looking forward to replacing vim installs.
@mrmasterkeyboard The comments complaining about this and gram being "political statements"
Yeah, sort of like how the EFF, copyleft, etc are politically neutral.
@xinit Thanks for not being some of the people in the comment sections that I've observed.
We forked it because we didn't want something that contributed to the current problems we have now or buggy code.
I don't get why anyone tried to politicise, ideologicise or try and put our fork in a position of wrongness in bad faith.
We're allowed to fork a project if we're not happy with it or want to add to it. If we weren't then projects like LibreOffice, FreeBSD and PostgreSQL wouldn't exist.
Kevin Karhan 
@mrmasterkeyboard @xinit the #RightToFork is elemental to #FLOSS and necessary for #OpenSource to exist.
- As much as I'm not a fan of seemingly abandoned forks of my works, I am not in the position to restrict or ban those.
- And people OFC have their right to make a #fork whenever they want to do so!
We ain't criticizing corporations that maintain outdated inhouse forks out of principle, and I think that #evi isn't a "fork for the sake of forking" but actually does things different and apparenty "irreconcileable" to the mainline Project.
- This is how #Innovation is born.
- See #NetBSD, #OpenBSD, #DragonflyBSD, #OpenZFS, #Illumos, #Waterfox, #TorBrowser, …
Nit to mention EVERYTHING IS "#POLITICAL" - including "apoliticalness"!
@mrmasterkeyboard @xinit no, but I can imagine these places to be full of assholes just talking shite.
When I forked vim I acted in the face of objections that this was a mere waste of time and that it would be of no practical use to anyone.
I've learned to ignore such neighsayers when confronting them was out if the question…
Still I'm not one to squander my investment [in time and resources] and I remain confident this will be worth far more than the initial appraisal [in shitpostings recieved]…
Half-Life 2: Episode Two G-man Scene [Heart-to-Heart] (1080p)
@mrmasterkeyboard @xinit if you refuse to acknowledge #ahitposters and their hate as legitimate but just respond calmly (if at all) you'll make their blood boil, heads implode and frustrate them the most.
- Besides the "optics" of being a level-headed #maintainer who doesn't waste time trying to argue against those that already made up their minds is just professional.
I genuinely want evi to succeed, because this is an important stance to take:
- If we allow the #Enshittification of fundamental tools in #tech we'll run the risk of being unable to maintain even the core functionality of ibfrastructure and systems.
- Because the longterm ramifications of using #vommits of #AIslop / #SlopCode are not just unknown, but already happening incidents based around "#AI" / "#VibeCoding" show that this is at best extremely fragile…
In fact, I want simple and auditable systems - espechally in critical infrastructure - and it needs to be reproduceable and maintainable.
- With human-written code one usually gets comments or can reason things out easily.
- Worst-case even ask the original author "Why did you do that?" because an "AI" cannot take or face #Accountability or #Consequences per design!
cloudskater@mrmasterkeyboard I don't understand why you're insistent on this not being a political move. Putting aside the fact that everything is political, open source software absolutely is, and forking a project because of its use of immoral technology is one of the most political and ideologically motivated reasons I can think of. I support it wholeheartedly, don't let assholes on the internet tell you that a project being any of those things is bad. It would actually help if more devs were honest with themselves and their audiences about such things, since then we might see them proclaim a stance against AI more openly instead of having to dig for it.
@cloudskater I probably should rephrase what I said, but what I tended to get across was that we don't want to start arguments with this fork nor do we want drama. We simply want to have a VIm without AI code.
I get there is politics in everything, we're attempting to keep away from arguments in general that could come with that.
Lichowait, Vim?! Et tu, Brute? No...
Thank you @mrmasterkeyboard for doing this. Where do I find out when the aur package will be available?
@licho Yeah, VIm fell it to it too unfortunately. so did Neovim.
Thanks for the support too! I'm not sure about AUR packages but hopefully we'll get there soon. I don't use Arch anymore but we'll try to put it there soon.
For now, compiling from source is still really easy.
```
./configure
make -j $(nproc)
sudo make install
```
Install goes to /usr/local in my case.
@mrmasterkeyboard 🙏thank you so much. Now, I have like 8 machines I have to replace it on.
@licho No problem! (if you want more features too, you can add --with-features=huge to the ./configure)
Reid 
@licho @mrmasterkeyboard I started working on a PKGBUILD but got sidetracked when I found a bug with the renamed binaries; should be coming soon™ (probably tomorrow)
@reiddragon @licho oh yeah I forgot you were working on that haha, sooner than I said then!
@reiddragon @mrmasterkeyboard you're angels, comrades
Arnan@mrmasterkeyboard My opinion - Vim has no business including AI, it's a terminal/command prompt text editor ffs.
But then, I don't use Vim, don't even like it. I'm a Nano guy if I have to use terminal and edit something. Eww!
So any effort to not do 'AI everything' is a good effort.
👍
Will I use EVi? Probably not. I'll stick to GUI. One comment though - Every time I see the name EVi I'm reminded about electric cars...
@arnan when I see EVi, I think of ESXi by VMware... and also many words in front of Vi.
uniq@mrmasterkeyboard thanks for doing the right thing!
Good luck with rebranding, my first association when reading EVi was electric vehicles.
Eskild Hustvedt@mrmasterkeyboard You forked vim to have a version without slop? You’re my heroes, I love this and I will certainly be following along, and switch to your fork.