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Comment by gchamonlive

7 hours ago

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 of a self inflicted wound.

Use the proper tools for the job. Saying that neovim developers "had no concept of a duty of care to their users" is really disrespectful. Neovim's Lua API is overflowing with care, you just need to go look.

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gchamonlive

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sdorf  7 hours ago

I've always assumed that undo history is ephemeral in any application I use, other than maybe an application where history is first-class in a timeline like Fusion360. I'm surprised to hear that people rely on it being persistent.

  • gchamonlive  6 hours ago

    Persistent undo is useful, but when it's unavailable or corrupted for me it's like "oh too bad", because it's just a convenience. And then I read things like this I get horrified by the workflows people adapt in order to avoid learning how to use the available tools properly. Seriously, it's just vim, borg and git...

  • delecti  6 hours ago

    > I'm surprised to hear that people rely on it being persistent.

    The feature's name has "persistent" in it.

drfloyd51  6 hours ago

Not using it as a backup strategy. But it doesn’t matter. Vim has a feature, persistent undo. People are using it for whatever reason. Under your blessing or not. A different app, neovim, broke vim’s feature.

They don't get a pass because you disagree with an imagined use case.

  • gchamonlive  6 hours ago

    Yeah, they could have done better, but to say they "had no concept of a duty of care to their users"... Isn't it a bit much?

    • tolerance  6 hours ago

      The entire story is a setup for a remark about a Neovim maintainer's refusal to remove a David Heinemeier Hansson quote from the Neovim homepage [0]. So with that in mind the rhetoric makes sense.

      [0]: In spite of the author at Unsung saying that Neovim is "in news" for other reasons. Chisnall's account is being given in the immediate context of that news.

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