A Vim fork has arrived, and it exists because of AI. Drew DeVault, the developer behind SourceHut, announced Vim Classic back in March 2026 after becoming unhappy with the direction both Vim and NeoVim were heading.
His gripe was that generative AI had started creeping into their development, and he wanted no part of it.
The NeoVim side of that concern is the project's labeling of AI-assisted pull requests as "AI assisted 🤖," which has now stacked up a fair number of requests, many of which have already been merged.
With Vim, the situation is a bit murky. Drew points to a GitHub issue where community members suspected one contributor of using LLMs, but a Vim maintainer had already pushed back on those accusations.
Anyhow, Vim Classic has received its first-ever release, so let's see what it has to offer.
A classic Vim experience
Based on Vim 8.2.0148, Vim Classic predates the Vim9 script entirely. This was done deliberately to keep the maintenance burden manageable, stopping at the last patch before the script was introduced.
As a result, some Vim plugins that rely on Vim9 Script will not work with Vim Classic.
From that base, select patches have been backported from upstream, mostly addressing CVEs discovered after 8.2, alongside some bug fixes and original patches to keep things building on modern toolchains.
DeVault is also upfront that not every applicable security patch has been confirmed as backported, so some CVEs may have slipped through. The project is currently recommended only for early adopters comfortable with that uncertainty.
In addition, the charityware model carries over from Vim, with this project continuing to support the children of Uganda (albeit via a different charity) that Bram Moolenaar, the creator of Vim, endorsed.
The packages
Vim Classic 8.3 is currently available as a source tarball from SourceHut (direct download). You will also find the release tarball and its PGP signature, signed with DeVault's public key, up on the project's refs page.
For the source code, head to the homepage of the SourceHut instance for Vim Classic.
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