I have been using Vim since 4 years. I am looking forward to contribute to the open source project vim. I would like a few tips on where to start and whom to contact to contribute to Vim. Help from people who have already contributed to Vim would help a lot :). Thanks in advance.
PS - I am not even sure whether i can post this here but finally decided to post it here as this would be the place with the most Vim enthusiasts to talk with.
As lcd047 pointed out, there is the vim_dev Google Group where you can submit patches. At present, Vim is under version control in a Mercurial repository. You can submit patches by opening a new topic in that group and attaching your patch file (a text file with the diff output). The Vim source is in the process of moving to GitHub, but I don't think it's quite there yet.
While many open-source projects, including Vim, have a to-do list, it's not likely that you will be assigned anything just by volunteering your services. Most open-source contributions are impromptu: you identify a bug fix or improvement, implement it, and submit it for review, then the maintainer can choose to merge it in.
I have a very simple contribution in the Vim source. I noticed that the i( text object didn't behave nicely when the contents of the parentheses were on their own lines. In contrast, the analogous i{ text object behaved appropriately in similar situations. I submitted my patch and it was actually merged in swiftly. Of course, this was a very small change; more significant patches tend to be subject to longer review.
Don't enter into the game with the plan to contribute to Vim. Good ideas don't normally come from trying to think of good ideas. They come when you're trying to do something else. Keep using Vim and an idea may present itself. Then put in the effort to implement it and submit a patch.
In the past I could upload a patch to the issue tracker of the Google Code repository for vim which was accepted after some months or send a mail and hope to get some feedback. Google Code is no more, but since 24 August 2015 vim's development happens on a Github project (including source code and issue tracking).
More instructions for contributing can be found in the CONTRIBUTING.md file. Do note that this Github project is an unusual one. If you propose a PR, the change might be taken and squashed with other commits (examples: PR and commit, another larger PR and commit). The commit messages follow a very specific format and you have to look very hard to find the origin and discussion of patches.
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