Commenters frame debate around philosophy of care and design priorities
4 Sep 27 11:30 AM · 1d ago · 9 comments · 1 source · development 4 of 4
The conversation shifts to questioning what 'duty of care' means: whether it is violated by silent data deletion, whether open-source maintainers implicitly promise safety, and whether different design philosophies (backward compatibility versus modern simplification) represent different kinds of care.
“NeoVIM has a different concept of care for their users. They're optimizing for another kind of care, more in line with modern expectations, which VIM did not care about (hence the fork). It's not better or worse, just different.”
dlisboa
Marcin Wichary UX designer and vim userNeoVim developers Open-source maintainersJef Raskin Computing pioneer and author
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What people said 24 voices · best of 92 · verbatim
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> Data loss only occurs if both editors are configured to share an undo directory which is going to be the case for ~100% of persistent undo users switching from vim to neovim, becuase you'll have the preference for this in your vimrc which you'll surely reuse across the two editors. (the quote feels like such a classic orange site "gotcha"…
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The feature that was broken is called persistent undo. The docs unambiguously state that edit history will be preserved unless Vim/Neovim detects that the "undo file is no longer synchronized with the file it was written for."https://neovim.io/doc/user/undo/#_5.-undo-persistenceSo even putting aside the Vim/Neovim interoperability angle, that…
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https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/13973#issuecomment-879067052 >> It shouldn't overwrite an unreadable file tho, unless I have completely misread the code. > It doesn't, but because it reads the vim-specific config file from the vim-specified location it then writes a file in that location with the name that vim expects, so files that I first…
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"Vibe shift" is all the rage these days but one area where it's most apparent is modern software.People of Raskin's vintage had a very humanist approach to computing. The mentality was very much an outgrowth of the cultural revolution of the 60s. Computer usage should be joyful rather than toiling. The computer should help you. It should make you…
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I didn't remember vim breaking the format, so I went back to check: The version change from 1 to 2 was in May 2010. Persistent undo was introduced in vim 7.3, which was released in August 2010. The format changed once, *before the feature was released*. Since vim 7.3 was released, persistent undo has gained features but has not been broken. My…
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> the attitude that just because something is a persistent file on your filesystem that contains data that you might want is no reason for their program not to delete it meant they had no concept of a duty of care to their users.That's the wrong way to look at it. NeoVIM has a different concept of care for their users. They're optimizing for…
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Sorry if too off topic; The inspiration for the lists name comes from a podcast "weird little guys" portraying nazis. The podcasts naming wants to emphasize that people doing really bad things are not that different from people that don't. The step from "just a little weird" to wanting to harm certain minorities in very unethical ways is way…
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This story has no references that support the author's version of events, but it does appear to be substantially true that:1. The change would break undo history, for both Neovim and Vim.2. This means Neovim would delete data created by a different program, on another user's computer.3. This was known before the feature was released.4. They did it…
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Neovim had caused me huge data loss at leat 3 times. For some reason, my kernel was unstable and would randomly panic (like once a week). This is a bug, OK. But every document opened in neovim at the time of the crash would be completely erased. It didn’t happened with Vim. I investigated and found a reported bug about it. basically, Neovim…
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Vim undofile "data loss" happens because Vim (VIM!) will reset the undofile will reset the undofile if an external tool (git, nano) changed the file while Vim is not running.Go ahead, try it: # Make some edits, then exit vim (remember to exit). vim --clean +'set undofile' foo.txt # Edit the same file with non-vim; save the changes. nano foo.txt #…
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Some context from a related HN comment before the pitchforks come out: > While I agree with the article's point, we should note that collisions do not happen out of the box because Neovim defaults undodir to $XDG_STATE_HOME/nvim/undo/ (~ /.local/state/nvim/undo/), while Vim defaults to storing .un~ files alongside the edited file or inside ~…
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Am I missing something? Are people using persistent undo as backup?This seems however more like of a documentation and UX problem. Neovim should warn and ask before deleting old undo files, or at least back them up, but it's not neovim's fault if people don't use reliable backup and versioning systems. Relying on persistent undo for this is kind…
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> Then why isn't there code in Vim to auto-upgrade from 1 to 2? Because 1 *was never shipped in a released version of vim*. The first version of vim to support persistent undo shipped three months after the bump to 2. Once a feature ships, you have backwards compatibility requirements. Before a feature ships, you don't but you may still want…
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According to the rev history for VIM, persistent undo arrived in version 7.3, released in 2010. So Chisnall may have used it since 2000, but he didn't have persistent undo for at least two of the books he wrote. And it means it wasn't "maintained for almost 20 years", it's at best 16.But it is a nice feature.I do that by using version control. I…
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Drew calling other people weird is comical.
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Today it's the work of a moment to get a coding agent to change the format of a file for you. I guess the point of this story is supposed to be like the famous Van Halen brown M&Ms contract clause. But the world is changing fast and I think it makes sense to start taking more ownership of your own computing experience, especially when the software…
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For two reasons: 1. Because they did change it *before* the release and they wanted to provide helpful errors for people running the pre-release versions, and *removing* it for the release would have caused problems. 2. Because they designed with backward compatibility in mind and the version allowed them to provide an upgrade path if they ever…
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The argument is that developers have a duty not to arbitrarily delete data on your system that you may have relied on that was produced by another program just because they’d like to replace it with something in their own format.I don’t care if you’re volunteering your time; if you build something whose implied purpose and success depends on other…
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Please reconsider whether interacting like this, and especially spending time in "sneer threads", is healthy for yourself, or an effective way to convince people of your beliefs.
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But you still have to share the undodir for both vim and neovim right? If your undo data was that precious why would you gamble the interoperability? You could just have them in different folders and it would be fine.So the case is, you really need you undo history and want to try out neovim so you just copy paste you vimrc to the new place and…
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I mean, Peter Thiel has some reallllly bad and harmful ideas. Watching one video about it obviously isn’t a black mark on your soul that dooms you to be evil forever. But if you’re going around posting coy things like this, my read (could be wrong) is that you agree with Thiel on the ‘anti-woke agenda’, and maybe even his ‘post-democratic’ ‘dark…
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> I think Neovim's decisions are justfiable in this context.Needing to know in advance that neovim requires a specifying a different undodir to vim, because neovim's persistent undo format is unstable even though vim's is stable, but the feature is called the same thing and neovim bills itself as a plug and play replacement for vim...This is very…
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Hm. > The step from "just a little weird" to wanting to harm certain minorities in very unethical ways is way smaller than one thinks. The action / behaviour of creating a public shame-list is a violent, slippery and divisive action. Will cause harm. It's a toxic behaviour. Nazis and Fascists loved lists. They had many lists, so here's another…
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Neovim is advertised as being a plug in replacement for vim, which is 100% not true. Many things are different, including undo files and :!. I can't remember the feature that made me give up, but at some point the switch became more work than it was worth, considering my vim setup already works. I'm not sure what I would do if I were starting out…
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