My association with Bram started in July 1993, when I first began looking for a clone of the “vi” editor that would work on the new Linux operation system. I discovered Vim-1.27 as a collection of shell archives on the comp.editors newsgroup and found it to be much better than anything else available, particularly Elvis, a bare-bones vi clone originally included in the first Linux distribution, Slackware, created by Patrick Volkerding.
Upon discovering how good Vim was, I took two actions: (1) I started communicating with Bram to improve Vim and informing him of bugs I encountered; (2) I repackaged Vim from the shell archives it used for distribution into a compressed tar file (the new standard for software packaging) and uploaded it to the new SunSITE archive for Unix-compatible software that served as the place where Linux-compatible software was being collected.
At some point, Slackware replaced Elvis with Vim. I don’t recall whether that was because of any recommendation I made to Volkerding or just because he discovered it on SunSITE. From then on, Vim became the de facto vi editor in Linux distributions going forward. When Bram asked for volunteers to help take care of distributing releases of Vim to various ftp sites, I volunteered to be the one to distribute new releases to the Linux archives.
In early 1996, dissatisfied with the very rudimentary functionality of the ctags utility (from emacs) included in the Linux distributions, I decided I was going to create something better. To get me started, I began with the ctags program packaged with Elvis (always better to start from working code), then took a jackhammer to it and produced the initial release of Exuberant Ctags. Bram agreed to include my ctags in the Vim distribution, much as emacs and Elvis both included their own ctags utilities.
A couple of years later, Red Hat decided to replace its former ctags program with Exuberant Ctags, which led to it becoming the de facto standard ctags program in Linux distributions going forward.
I worked out with Bram and the authors of several other authors of editor programs a backwards-compatible extension to the ctags file format that would encode additional information about the tags to assist their selection in code with multiple matches to a given tag.
After 10 years, or so, Bram thought it was time that Exuberant Ctags move out from being packaged with Vim because Bram liked the idea of the entire release of Vim fitting onto a single floppy disk and, as both Vim and Exuberant Ctags had grown, this was no longer possible.
In reviewing my association with Bram, I noted my email archive shows over 700 messages we exchanged over the course of 13 years or so. Bram was always pleasant to interact with and tolerant of my sometimes harsh and blunt tone (self-awareness only comes slowly). I also was touched by his story of his connection to the children of Uganda. I am grateful to have known Bram and worked together with him. His creation was a mainstay of my professional and private life for three decades. I still use Vim to this day.