Vim On Android — Bounty Offered

UPDATE 06/06/2011: There is a dona­tion site where you can add to the bounty.

I’ve spent a good amount of time turn­ing Vim into my text edi­tor of choice, both for code but more recently for writ­ing. I’ve tried other prod­ucts, and while they all have their good points, I always return to my Vim setup. I love Vim for a num­ber of rea­sons, but amongst the top is that I can run it on any system.

Well, almost.

My lap­top died about two weeks ago. I was lucky: I went to Google I/O and they gave me a spiffy new Android tablet. I can use it for almost all of my work, but I can­not run Vim on it natively. Yes, I could SSH to a box but I am not always con­nected to the Inter­net and want the power and flex­i­bil­ity of Vim with me when­ever I need it.

To that end, I am open­ing up a bounty on port­ing Vim to the Android plat­form. To win the bounty, the devel­oper or team of devel­op­ers must do the following:

• Cre­ate a port of Vim that runs on Android natively with­out need­ing to root the sys­tem. It should work equally well on both phones and tablets. It should sup­port syn­tax files and plugins.

• Must make the code open source.

• Must release the app under the same licens­ing that Vim uses. See this doc for more info..

• Must put it in the Android Mar­ket for free (as in beer), or allow me to do so.

• Must agree to main­tain the port for one year.

I am open­ing up the bounty with $100 of my own money, but oth­ers have noted that they want to pitch in. I am look­ing for a third party site to assist in man­ag­ing the bounty. If you know of one, con­tact me. I con­sid­ered Kick­starter but as stated in their guide­lines, they do not han­dle fund­ing for soft­ware projects unless the project cre­ator is the devel­oper, which I am not.

If you want to donate, please con­tact me. If you want to try to claim the bounty, con­tact me as well.

Christo­pher T. Miller

Christo­pher T. Miller is a soft­ware devel­oper by trade and a writer by neces­sity. He is one of the co-founders of Podiobooks.com and is the Over­lord of The Secret Lair. He has not yet been eaten by a grue.