Thread · HN Continuity

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 [see edit: this is not the really the case]

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 anyway.

I don't think there can really be any post-hoc justification of this.

<a href="https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/13973#issuecomment-789262094" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/13973#issuecomment-789...

edit: I missed an important detail. The user specified the same path for undodir in both nvim and vim. Vim requires a path to enable the feature - there is no shared default path. The user sharing a path changes the story considerably in my view, because now this is a case of nvim deleting data created by nvim as an alternative to writing a data migration for it.

I could still disagree with that, but it makes alternatives like "just use a different path" more complicated at a minimum and really changes my read of this situation completely. I think Neovim's decisions are justfiable in this context. Maybe they could have saved the contents of the old undo folder somewhere and notified the user - arguably that would be more empathic I don't really agree they had a moral duty to do this.