Help Wanted: New Collaborator

[PhilRunninger]

What?

With this issue I am announcing my retirement from NERDTree. It's been a good six years, full of many enhancements and fixes for this much-loved plugin, but it's time for me to move on.

Why?

1. I'm tired, and I've been procrastinating other things.

2. Every application has an expiration date, and NERDTree has many years left in it. But Vim 8+ and Neovim have introduced new capabilities that other authors have exploited to write very good alternatives - plugins whose features NERDTree would have a very difficult time assimilating. In a very real sense, NERDTree is the inspiration for many similar plugins that came after it. It may be time to pass the torch. You may disagree with me. That's OK; I'm not offended. All I ask is that you get involved if you think NERDTree should continue.

3. I have noticed that as I took on more responsibility as maintainer, participation from the user community fell off in both the discussion of issues and the authoring of pull requests. My hope is that trend will reverse itself as I step away.

Now What?

If you are interested in becoming a collaborator, leave a comment below. I will continue monitoring this thread, and will make appropriate evaluations of interested parties. @scrooloose, @lifecrisis, and @alerque, I invite you to weigh in, as well.

Thanks,
Phil

[alerque]

Thanks for posting this. I think the general assessment that this plugin is best paired with a previous generation of editors is about right. The same goes for many plugins these days. That being said I expect there is a very long tail of people that will keep using this for the foreseeable future.

I do hope somebody that actively uses this will step up to maintain it. It probably only needs a light touch at this point, but I don't use it myself enough to be the best person for that. I will however be around to help get a new maintainer setup with the necessary permissions here and make sure things go smoothly for users along the way. It could even be more than one person of there are a couple people each with variable time available for such a project. Anybody with an interest please do drop a line here and we'll evaluate how to proceed.

[Rick21-bit]

it's ok, i forget you

[lifecrisis]

Phil: I don't have much to say. I just want to add that your work over the years has been much appreciated by users. I feel that I am in a unique position that allows me to give the sincerest "Thank you!" one can give. This is due to the fact that I know how tough Vimscript can be and how fussy Vim users can be. Never having tried a NERDTree alternative, I can't say that true replacements exist for me yet. I can't imagine that another plugin really surpasses the NERDTree in terms of stability and usability. It probably doesn't matter in my case. The NERDTree is so thoroughly "in my fingers" that I would have tremendous difficulty adopting another plugin for the same use case. Goodbye and good luck, Phil!

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-- Jason

[njligames]

I completely enjoy using vim with nerdtree. In fact, I only use vim with nerdtree installed.
I have never written a plug-in but would enjoy participating.
I would need some direction, but I'm all ears.

[alerque]

@njligames Feel free to jump in. The best places to start would probably to to work through existing issues and evaluate whether they are a question you can answer, a problem you can solve, or when appropriate explain why an issue may not be addressable. Also any open PRs could use review and testing, suggesting anything that would need fixing before they should be merged. If you have contributions of your own go ahead and open PRs.

I'll be keeping an eye on such contributions from you or others and if they seem like quality moves forward will be happy to boost permissions to reduce friction managing issues, merging PRs, etc.

[willchao612]

@alerque I've written two vim plugins far less complicated than nerdtree, but I would love to be a part of nerdtree's development. I will learn and try to be active.

[albertoperdomo2]

I have used NERDTree for some time and I really liked it. I don't like the idea of it falling behind, but as many others, I do not have experience developing plug-in's. Anyway, following @alerque notes, I would love to start checking some opened issues and trying my best to fix those. Great work @PhilRunninger, you built a great tool!

[mid-kid]

Having had this plugin in my primary vim config for years, I can recall this being the primary plugin to have a file tree back in the day, with no real alternative existing. Of course, this was before neovim and LSP and whatnot. It's served me well for the longest time. Thanks for maintaining it.

As a user I wonder, what does the competition look like these days? What sort of Vim8/NeoVim shenanigans do they involve themselves with?

[flwyd]

Is it possible to consider a change of license? WTFPL is not an OSI-approved license, and it is legally unclear if is actually a public domain dedication.
My employer takes the position that the terms which allow me to contribute to open source projects in general do not permit contributions to WTFPL projects.

[lifecrisis]

On Fri, 2021-11-05 at 23:55 -0700, Trevor Stone wrote: Is it possible to consider a change of license? WTFPL is not an OSI-approved license, and it is legally unclear if is actually a public domain dedication. My employer takes the position that the terms which allow me to contribute to open source projects in general do not permit contributions to WTFPL projects.

Interestingly enough, I believe that the WTFPL does allow you to fork the project and change the license to whatever you want. I've considered doing this myself. I always thought that the WTFPL was a bit too cute. I may create my own fork still. Hmmm...

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-- lifecrisis

[PhilRunninger]

I'm OK with changing the license. There was a similar discussion in the nerdcommenter project, which was subsequently changed to a CC0 license.