Gotta be honest, this seems like making a mountain out of a molehill. Yeah, DHH is an awful person. His endorsement was removed from the page pretty quickly, but of course not fast enough to avoid the social media mob handing down their verdict upon the thankless maintainers. I sympathize with the Neovim developer in that thread, the driveby Github commenters with seemingly no other involvement in the project are some of the least well-socialized people alive.
The social media mob descended because one of the neovim maintainers was immediately actively hostile and defensive in the github issue, accusing the person who opened the issue to be making "demands" and "threats" (when there were no such demands or threats).
If the first reply on that issue was, "sure, you're right, could you submit a PR to remove it from the website", or even "this isn't important to me but I can see why this might turn people away, let's remove it", then there wouldn't have been any kind of drama.
> accusing the person who opened the issue to be making "demands" and "threats" (when there were no such demands or threats)
lol, it's not like this is the first time the mob has descended upon some hapless open source project's communication channels. it's annoying as shit (as a maintainer of a significant project myself, hence the throwaway), and those who participate are worthless entitled nobodies who would never lift a finger to help me with any of the hard parts of my job that i do for them, for free. recent example from KDE:
my politics is the opposite of dhh's. my main issue is that people who get involved in projects for political reasons tend to hurt the project and its community for little gain (besides puritanical ideological adherence testing, for whatever that's worth. see elsewhere in this thread where someone found and archived the neovim maintainer's youtube playlists. how incredibly weird and off-putting). just an insanely unproductive way to push for positive change
we've seen stuff like this play out and turn into shitstorms several times by now, so yeah, it's pretty understandable to react instinctively to something like this happening with "get bent". not what i would've done, but people aren't perfect
In this case, all evidence points to the lead maintainer sympathizing with DHH's views. If his immediate hostility towards someone politely suggesting the removal of DHH's endorsement didn't make his stance clear enough, here's an archive of his previously public YouTube playlist titled "history," full of talks from far right ideologues like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin.
The relatively small core team has a member giving talks about Neovim at DHH's conference and another one prominently displaying Palantir as their employer in their GitHub profile.
It's clear where their sympathies lie, and that GitHub issue wasn't a one-off coming from a stressful online interaction.
I'm not gonna gather 'evidence' for or against what some guy who happens to maintain a text editor I use thinks about the issues of the day. It's just creepy behavior, and a huge violation of personal boundaries. Why do you think this is an acceptable thing to do? Go outside.
Regardless, the material you've posted doesn't indicate much about him to me beyond that we have political differences, which is okay. That's literally fine. It's definitely not enough to condemn someone as a Nazi sympathizer.
It's also hard to stay cool and agree with the mob dogpiling you over (tbh) a triviality. Anyone who's had to have difficult conversations in the real world knows that. I'm not going to expect people to respond in the best way to such things (easy to project this expectation when you're an anonymous name in the crowd, though).
I still don’t understand how quoting something that someone said about Neovim means that you support Nazism, just because said person happened to be a Nazi.
tl;dr: the website showed the quote “Full-screen Neovim looks cool as hell!” by some programmer with political views. After initial pushback it eventually got removed
In my view the core of the "drama" is about whether quoting an unpolitical statement of a person endorses the person as a whole, including their political views.
The maintainer who originally responded to the github issue clearly thinks that it does not. The reporter and Twitter mob think that it does
Whether we disagree with his political views (I hope so) and how political a project like neovim is would be questions to answer once agreement on the first question is reached
It doesn’t matter what his political views are, as they’re totally unrelated to what he said about Neovim. Quoting what he said about Neovim does not in any way indicate support of his political views.
Feels like opal drama all over again, more than a decade later. Why is the ruby community so uniquely toxic, whichever side you’re on. (Yes I’m aware neovim isn’t a ruby community, but the drama is once again centered on a ruby personality.)
Gotta be honest, this seems like making a mountain out of a molehill. Yeah, DHH is an awful person. His endorsement was removed from the page pretty quickly, but of course not fast enough to avoid the social media mob handing down their verdict upon the thankless maintainers. I sympathize with the Neovim developer in that thread, the driveby Github commenters with seemingly no other involvement in the project are some of the least well-socialized people alive.
The social media mob descended because one of the neovim maintainers was immediately actively hostile and defensive in the github issue, accusing the person who opened the issue to be making "demands" and "threats" (when there were no such demands or threats).
If the first reply on that issue was, "sure, you're right, could you submit a PR to remove it from the website", or even "this isn't important to me but I can see why this might turn people away, let's remove it", then there wouldn't have been any kind of drama.
> accusing the person who opened the issue to be making "demands" and "threats" (when there were no such demands or threats)
lol, it's not like this is the first time the mob has descended upon some hapless open source project's communication channels. it's annoying as shit (as a maintainer of a significant project myself, hence the throwaway), and those who participate are worthless entitled nobodies who would never lift a finger to help me with any of the hard parts of my job that i do for them, for free. recent example from KDE:
https://pointieststick.com/2026/09/23/kde-and-ai-and-you-and...
my politics is the opposite of dhh's. my main issue is that people who get involved in projects for political reasons tend to hurt the project and its community for little gain (besides puritanical ideological adherence testing, for whatever that's worth. see elsewhere in this thread where someone found and archived the neovim maintainer's youtube playlists. how incredibly weird and off-putting). just an insanely unproductive way to push for positive change
we've seen stuff like this play out and turn into shitstorms several times by now, so yeah, it's pretty understandable to react instinctively to something like this happening with "get bent". not what i would've done, but people aren't perfect
/rant
In this case, all evidence points to the lead maintainer sympathizing with DHH's views. If his immediate hostility towards someone politely suggesting the removal of DHH's endorsement didn't make his stance clear enough, here's an archive of his previously public YouTube playlist titled "history," full of talks from far right ideologues like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin.
https://archive.is/3cNBr
The relatively small core team has a member giving talks about Neovim at DHH's conference and another one prominently displaying Palantir as their employer in their GitHub profile.
It's clear where their sympathies lie, and that GitHub issue wasn't a one-off coming from a stressful online interaction.
I'm not gonna gather 'evidence' for or against what some guy who happens to maintain a text editor I use thinks about the issues of the day. It's just creepy behavior, and a huge violation of personal boundaries. Why do you think this is an acceptable thing to do? Go outside.
Regardless, the material you've posted doesn't indicate much about him to me beyond that we have political differences, which is okay. That's literally fine. It's definitely not enough to condemn someone as a Nazi sympathizer.
To be fair, it’s not hard to say “white supremacy is bad and I’m not cool with it”
It took me only 10 seconds to write.
It's also hard to stay cool and agree with the mob dogpiling you over (tbh) a triviality. Anyone who's had to have difficult conversations in the real world knows that. I'm not going to expect people to respond in the best way to such things (easy to project this expectation when you're an anonymous name in the crowd, though).
1 reply →
I still don’t understand how quoting something that someone said about Neovim means that you support Nazism, just because said person happened to be a Nazi.
> only 10 seconds to write
I'm White (99.44% pure Celtic-British Isles), and I type 100wpm. Isn't it ironic.
1 reply →
tl;dr: the website showed the quote “Full-screen Neovim looks cool as hell!” by some programmer with political views. After initial pushback it eventually got removed
> programmer with political views
It's dishonest to downplay what his "political views" entail. He compared the removal of minorities to pest extermination.
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
In my view the core of the "drama" is about whether quoting an unpolitical statement of a person endorses the person as a whole, including their political views.
The maintainer who originally responded to the github issue clearly thinks that it does not. The reporter and Twitter mob think that it does
Whether we disagree with his political views (I hope so) and how political a project like neovim is would be questions to answer once agreement on the first question is reached
3 replies →
It doesn’t matter what his political views are, as they’re totally unrelated to what he said about Neovim. Quoting what he said about Neovim does not in any way indicate support of his political views.
[flagged]
1 reply →
[flagged]
Feels like opal drama all over again, more than a decade later. Why is the ruby community so uniquely toxic, whichever side you’re on. (Yes I’m aware neovim isn’t a ruby community, but the drama is once again centered on a ruby personality.)