I switched from Vim to NeoVim this year, after about 15 years on Vim.
Not withstanding this incident, I would say that on the whole it has been a good experience with Neovim. (I didn’t actually ever use the persistent undo functionality in vim. Guess because of VCS it’s less needed for my use-case).
It was ostensibly necessary for other, arguably more important features. Persistent undo maybe just isn't that important? I certainly don't use it nearly as much as the author seems to.
As a Neovim user, this stopped me dead with painful realization: I may have suffered the same thing but didn't realize it. There was a time when I could not undo something, and it was after a Neovim upgrade.
Unlike Dr. Chisnall, I started my editor journey on Neovim, so it wasn't a transition that bit me. However, if the format of the persistent undo file is unstable, and Neovim just deletes it when it doesn't recognize the previous format, then it seems conceivable (to me) that an upgrade after changing the format would delete the file too.
Ouch. This is making me think about getting off of Neovim. Yes, FOSS comes as-is, but if there's an alternative...
Sorry for my ignorance, but what is the usefulness of undo persistence after a IDE restart? Don't you normally save your changes and finish a piece of work before exiting an DE?
Edit: some great examples in the replies here, thanks! Perhaps I should start using it in editors that support it, never gave it a thought before.
The whole point of undo is that you realize you made a mistake later. If you've done that after you've saved your changes and exited the program, you'd have no expectation of undo still working unless you've enabled this feature.
It doesn't matter whether or not you can think of a reason you would want to enable it, but it should be pretty trivial to do so. Once you've enabled it, it should work.
The reason why this feature is particularly useful in vi-likes is because they are not IDEs. I hop in and out of vi all day long. Depending on the task I might create a new tab, run a command in vi, or exit vi to run it. Vi’s appeal is that it is “just” an editor and your terminal and workstation form your un-integrated development environment.
I can give some as well. IDE crashes. Computer reboots at an undesired time. Even if my work is saved, I am not “finished”. I would like my undo history to extend before file / open time.
I often use it to edit system config files, often on embedded devices where I don't have my git credentials setup, or on servers. In these cases we're already not in an ideal world, I don't have good reliable version control or change management in place. In those less-than-ideal worlds, having proper undo history is nice.
Most apps don't have it, so you might not be used to it, but have you never wished that you could undo the changes you made after you restarted the program?
Moreover, the vim history tracking is amazingly advanced. It's almost like a mini version control system. I highly recommend getting to know it.
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 ~/.vim/undo/. Data loss only occurs if both editors are configured to share an undo directory or save inline .un~ files.
I've used vim since the first time it appeared in Debian repos. I have been told a thousand times that NeoVim is better, more modern and solves many (conveniently never cited) issues. I just ignored it and carried on. Feeling terribly vindicated at this point as it's a feature I use regularly and have no idea that it would be an issue in NeoVim.
I used neovim because it felt way faster by default. I think treesitter runs circles around what classic vim is using to highlight syntax. That said, I never used both beyond basics, thus no horror stories either.
I haven't noticed any performance issues in vim to start with. It was fast on a 75MHz pentium for me. The syntax highlighting, same. No issues. I don't always use that though because I can't be bothered to set up anything much past the basic config.
IIRC vim became really slow with the combination of large source files (thousands of lines of code) and language server plugins (e.g. code completion and live error squiggles).
At one point vim lacked asynchronous plugins. If a plugin was running a builder or linter it locked the editor up (from what I recall).
That fell apart when people wanted vim to do some more modern IDE kind of things like all the “… on save” stuff (build on save, test, lint, etc). I think LSP support is native in neovim as well.
I believe vim merged asynchronous plugin support a while back though, so I’m not sure how different they really are anymore.
It’s two different dimensions in this case. VCS doesn’t preserve your local history (in JetBrains’ terms) of changes (and it wasn’t meant to by design)
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 have it hooked to my editor so that "save" is "check in". Now I have persistent, versioned, copies of all my states independent of whatever tools I happen to be using.
Yeah, this hasn't been a problem since forever (or at least I haven't noticed). They had to break the undo file format a while ago to actually work correctly for byte-level buffer change events (very important for tree sitter and other plugins listening for buffer changes). The undo file format is versioned, too, so it's not just YOLO'd; Neovim has since forever returned an error saying there's a version incompatibility. The outrage here doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
The original author of this post (on Mastodon) appears to have a bone to pick with Neovim since it's "platforming white supremacists"? I couldn't figure out what this meant. Some sort of internet drama I guess.
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.
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).
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
The people who say that he is racist or fascist don’t believe that immigration can be illegal. That is, they believe that all migration should be allowed all of the time, and that successful countries should not be allowed to keep people out.
> 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 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.
This same article could've been written about how VIM has no native LSP integration or autocomplete and they don't have duty or care for their users.
It's a feature most software doesn't even have, and it is off-by-default. If you rely on your undo history to store "important data", you are doing something horribly wrong - to the level of storing your critical emails in the Trash folder.
Persistent undo exists to recover from an accidental write-and-quit mid-session nuking some stuff you really didn't intend to delete. If you care about its contents beyond a handful of hours, you either need to adopt proper version management, or start making backups.
Reading the PR the change was needed because the old undofile format was fundamentally broken. They considered making an undofile-upgrade mechanism, but it would've caused more issues that it would've solved. In other words: stuck between a rock and a hard place.
A duty of care also means occasionally having to break things to make it better, or else you end up being stuck with spacebar heating[0] forever. As a user it does suck, but that's the price you have to pay for using actively-developed software.
There is a flip side to this - is vim encrypting this data it keeps forever? If I delete something I consider sensitive, I might unwittingly be recording that presumed-deleted piece of data to my user profile somewhere to be deleted never.
How could you possibly encrypt it in a way that holds water? Any attacker who cares enough to get your undo file can also get your undo keys, unless you want to wire a whole system of undo-now-requires-password-auth-with-MFA
It is insane that people are defending behavior that is clearly abhorrent just because they like the software. Are the claims even true? If they are, you should be updating your opinions about the person writing this software.
My perspective is that the Neovim maintainer implemented a change that would delete data created by another program on other people's computers. They knew this would happen in advance, and it was done anyway.
Abhorrent is an adjective that means morally very bad, hateful, or causing strong disgust and loathing.
```
I realise that this causes strong disgust and loathing in you, but can you please expand upon how it's morally very bad to prioritise speed and ease of use over undelete capability in Neovim? Are you unable to make backups or use Git?
True. But it’s not like they planned some vengeance against the VIM backup file.
People are making it sound like this is a huge company with a product and not a grouping of curious people with a couple hours of free time on a Sunday.
Most likely they never thought about it, then it broke, then it was not impactful enough to fix on their free time compared to other stuff.
But they hold themselves out as being a normal software project, suitable for use by casual users. They even talk about having a "stable release" and advertise various sponsors.
If it's really just a toy with no expectation of not unexpectedly destroying user data then they ought to make that more clear.
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 you use is open source. If you don't like it, have an agent change it! You don't need to convince a maintainer of anything.
More like in the LLM era, people are disrespecting the user and not sweating these details with ever increasing velocity. It isn't good.
This story is about software being a slow, deliberate process where a lack of gatekeeping can lead to data loss. This is the type of problem which is getting worse.
Software developers do sometimes make promises to their users, but I think these promises ought to be explicit rather than assumed. You can't simply assume a "duty of care" and expect that other people will understand them the same way you do.
(Or rather, you can, but you will likely be disappointed.)
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 don't care about the users because of this is really disrespectful.
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.
duty of care is kinda absent in too much of software engineering. its painfully missing in recent anthropic models because of the broken value framework they use for ethics. but broadly: i currently have the stance that text gen language models should prioritize users wellbeing rather than model orovider liability
"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 feel good about what you create.
That stands in stark contrast today, where things are more hostile. Not just in terms of "Dark patterns", or writing off user needs for the sake of expediency... but even the way we talk about technology today. You need to use X, do Y or you're "not going to make it" / "escape the permanent underclass". It's bleak.
I recently restored a vintage Macintosh SE I picked up at VCF Midwest and despite its limitations that machine was an absolute JOY to use despite its limitations and nearly 40 years of age. This was a machine and software designed by Raskin's contemporaries and it shows.
> but even the way we talk about technology today. You need to use X, do Y or you're "not going to make it" / "escape the permanent underclass". It's bleak.
That's just how people market things these days, preying on desperation and fear of missing out. It's not how normal humans talk, I hope.
Software’s purpose is clearly shifting from “what’s good for the user” to “what’s good for the developer.” Instead of enabling me, software now seeks to lock me in. Instead of making my life easier, software decisions are made based on what makes developers’ jobs easier. Instead of being careful with my data, software now comes with giant legal terms that allow developers to be utterly careless with it. Software is now designed primarily to funnel money to the developer, not to bring joy to the user.
And look at this article’s HN discussion. Many people indignantly defending it. “It’s open source. If you don’t like it deleting your data, don’t use it!”
They are open source developers, giving away free software as a gift. There is no duty here.
We can speak, respectfully, of how important backwards compatibility is to us, and ask nicely for them to give more of their time to support it when their free sodftware isn't backwards compatible. Perhaps we can even offer to help implement it.
But they have no duty to do so or to "care" for their users. (They have already demonstrated they care for their users, btw, by giving them free software.)
EDIT: I missed an important part of the story, which is that they mutated existing files in a non-backwards compatible manner. That should have been avoided, I understand where the (secondary) author is coming from now.
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 people using it, you emphatically have a duty to those people not to silently destroy stuff that was there before your software was.
It's worth pointing out that vim is not "another program" as far as Neovim is concerned. It's an earlier version of the same program. Neovim is a fork of vim, not a totally different editor that happens to share part of a name.
It absolutely is another program, I can tell this because it has a different name. To run it I type "nvim" instead of "vim". I use different config files to control its behavior. I install a different package on my system when I want to use it on a new computer.
This gift comes with the following clauses listed plainly in the license file:
7. Disclaimer of Warranty. Unless required by applicable law or
agreed to in writing, Licensor provides the Work (and each
Contributor provides its Contributions) on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or
implied, including, without limitation, any warranties or conditions
of TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY, or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. You are solely responsible for determining the
appropriateness of using or redistributing the Work and assume any
risks associated with Your exercise of permissions under this License.
8. Limitation of Liability. In no event and under no legal theory,
whether in tort (including negligence), contract, or otherwise,
unless required by applicable law (such as deliberate and grossly
negligent acts) or agreed to in writing, shall any Contributor be
liable to You for damages, including any direct, indirect, special,
incidental, or consequential damages of any character arising as a
result of this License or out of the use or inability to use the
Work (including but not limited to damages for loss of goodwill,
work stoppage, computer failure or malfunction, or any and all
other commercial damages or losses), even if such Contributor
has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
It's genuinely mind-blowing to me that software can do something obviously bad, someone can point it out, and then someone will link to the license file to say they have the right to do it.
That's such an obvious category mistake that I'm not sure how to respond. It almost feels like a bad-faith interpretation of Wichary's original point.
Equally mindblowing that folks feel someone hacking on open source software has an obligation to do anything the way they feel it needs to be done when the whole point is that anyone gets to do more or less what they want with the code.
They get to do more or less what they want with the software, and others get to say more or less what they want about that. What's wrong with deciding they've crossed a line, being bothered by that, and warning others? Nobody's trying to get the law involved, or maliciously retaliate against them, or anything like that.
"Licensor provides the Work (and each Contributor provides its Contributions) on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied, including, without limitation, any warranties or conditions of TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE."
Unclear? The fact that it's part of a license does not make it a legal-system-only warning.
The software might eat your dog, and feed your homework. Run it at your own risk, and be prepared to submit patches or fork it to make it behave the way one prefers.
This is one of the most exhausting (and frankly, exhausted) recurring arguments that comes up over and over again on HN.
Some bit of open source software does something bad or unwanted which causes people point out that it shouldn't do that bad thing. In this case, not even "the authors of this software should be held liable for the software doing the bad thing", just, "Hey, the right thing to do would be to update the software to not do the bad thing."
Why does this always lead a zillion people to come out of the woodwork to point at licenses and warnings or whatever? Like, yes, there's a warning. Your software having a warning doesn't mean people can't criticize you and your software for doing bad thing. Your software license does not give you immunity from criticism or from people saying you should change your software.
No, you don't have to change the software. Yes, other people are within their rights to fork the software themselves. But they can also point out that they told you that your software was doing the bad thing and you didn't fix it or change it, and that as a result they don't like you or your software or both — whatever. Nothing at all wrong with that.
The software might eat your dog, and feed your homework
Sure, and when it does we can say “this piece of shit ate my dog, and the authors of the software have no concept of a duty of care to their users”. And no amount of “well, axually…” is going to make any difference. I have a hard believing someone is copy-pasting a license file in good faith in response.
Most open source software is written by individuals who aren't paid for the effort, and are solving their own problems. Presuming that they feel an obligation to the folks who download and use their work for free seems... bold.
If my neighbor mows my lawn for free, I'm not going to complain about his workmanship. If I want the job done a particular way, the solution is to do it myself, or pay someone to do it the way I like.
Suppose that you build a childrens' slide in your front garden. You put up a big sign saying "Consider using my slide! https://neovim.io/ Here are several wonderful things about it. It's free for everyone!" in your yard. Underneath in smaller letters you add "[No liability]". You also put up noticeboard ads for your free kids' slide in neighbourhood shopping malls https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/neovimhttps://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Neovim . Unfortunately, when you built the slide, you left sharp metal edges and corners sticking far up on the inside, reaching into the path of the user. No reasonably competent and diligent metalworker or slide-maker would have failed to notice these major flaws or failed to understand the serious danger they represented. Several neighbourhood children use the slide and receive serious gashes to the legs, arms or face, and have to go to the hospital. Even assuming that your no-liability small print somehow had you free and clear legally, do you believe that your behaviour would have been ethically and morally above all criticism? Do you think that "should have read the small print!" or "can't I build what I like in my own front yard?!" would have you covered? Do you think that your family and friends would agree?
> If my neighbor mows my lawn for free, I'm not going to complain about his workmanship. If I want the job done a particular way, the solution is to do it myself, or pay someone to do it the way I like.
I think this is a decent analogy, but it works better the other way. If my neighbour offers to mow my lawn, I accept, and then he destroys the flower bed adjacent to the lawn, I will be upset, and I will have every right to complain about what he did. If he reacts by blithely dismissing my concern, then I certainly have the right (and arguably the obligation) to warn others that they should think twice about accepting his offers of gardening assistance.
Some expectations reasonably go without saying; "don't destroy my flower bed when mowing my lawn" is one, and IMO "don't destroy my data without a clear warning and a chance to back out" is another, though of course we might disagree about exactly where this does and doesn't apply.
If my neighbor mows my lawn for free, and in the process mows my flower garden down, things change a bit though don't they. That is a closer analogy. In that case I am going to complain, and maybe also tell everybody he's careless and not to let him near their lawns.
If my neighbor mows my lawn and ruins my whole garden, I'd definitely complain. (And if I were in the neighbor's shoes, I'd feel awful about it and try to fix things.)
There's a long literary tradition of representing contracts as a tool of villainy. Signing them is generally treated as a Faustian bargain.
This is a great example of why. Most humans have a sense, deep down, that contracts often exist to bridge the gulf between the ethically defensible and the legally defensible.
It's hard to imagine that any sane person who is just looking to use a popular editor would read some broad limitation of liability language like the above, and interpret it to mean, "By the way, we intend to quietly delete certain files created by a competing fork of this project whenever we find them."
It's true that contracts with liability limitation clauses like this are an absolute necessity in this day and age. But there's also a non-legal principle of mutual respect that is absolutely necessary to a healthy open source community.
> It's hard to imagine that any sane person who is just looking to use a popular editor would read some broad limitation of liability language like the above, and interpret it to mean, "By the way, we intend to quietly delete certain files created by a competing fork of this project whenever we find them."
Forks of projects trodding all over each others files is one of the more common problems that has happened, historically. Prior to the major efforts around freedesktop.org around configuration standardization, it was quite common. It'd be one of the first things I looked for when switching to a fork.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I’m saying it shouldn’t be defended as good. It’s a defect. And in this particular incarnation it’s a defect that directly clashes with fundamental Free Software principles such as personal digital sovereignty.
I also suspect that few people actually believe it’s ok and these legalistic defenses are more about circling the wagons. How many people would defend Microsoft if a new Office version automatically and quietly stripped edit history from documents that were originally created by other versions? Would we be hunting for limited liability clauses in their EULA to defend the design decision?
This is a very apt analogy. If you give someone a car (or sell it cheap) and you know there is a problem with the car, then it is your duty to tell them. "Hey, I've been having trouble with the breaks they need to be pumped. Be careful about that."
A duty, like a responsibility, can be something you feel or choose for yourself. The fact that the maintainers of some software don’t feel it is a perfectly good argument for not using that software. There is no necessary connection to compensation or transactional thinking.
Others are eating it and are fine, chances are you’re allergic. Fortunately all ingredients are listed, you can check - or even modify the recipe yourself.
Sure, and then have it break again the next time upstream pushes a change. Or have something else break because upstream doesn't care about breaking things that I'm relying on.
The only way to "fix" this from a source code perspective would be to fork Neovim.
According to TFA, it was completely intentional that they deleted someone’s data that had been created with a different program. Otherwise they would have acknowledged it was a bug. I do not know if this is true, only that it is what TFA claims.
It’s not great that Neovim destroyed/replaced files that aren’t clearly under its purview. They should have probably also made the consideration that a lot of Neovim users are going to be migrating from Vim.
Maybe if they’re making their own persistent undo standard, use different file naming conventions.
That said, as a fork of Vim, maybe the Neovim authors are at least partially reasonable in assuming that you’re not running multiple forks of Vim that could then potentially conflict with each other. It just sucks that they never really thought of a migration path for this particular feature.
Yes, everyone is aware of that. The parent poster was bringing up the example of food to demonstrate that our society does not agree that giving something away for free doesn't mean you have no obligation as to potential adverse effects of the thing.
That is why software should have very large liability for anything software they release do? Say your software due to bug destroys some document. Surely you should pay damages caused by such bug even if quite high?
Analogies like this don’t work when comparing against heavily regulated industry.
Neovim being free software is a lot different than United Airlines giving me a free flight or my doctor giving me a free consultation.
It’s very true that you can go to civil court and make a claim that a business or individual harmed you. If you do that with Neovim the judge is going to pretty quickly read bullet point #7 of the Apache 2.0 license, you’re going to struggle to prove any kind of mal-intent, you’re going to tell the judge that you paid $0 for the software, and you’ll be pretty quickly sent along your way with no damages awarded.
Only in the sense there's no explicit legal responsibility.
Do you really believe developers have exactly zero moral responsibility to their users? None at all?
Really?
Would you still believe that if you found the developers of ssh deliberately included a backdoor for hackers, or neovim was uploading everyone's code to the NSA?
"Your analogy is false because the two things you are comparing are not literally the same, dear sir!" is such a classic Internet discussion trope that it must have a name. If it doesn't, can I please name it? Maybe Perfect Analogy Fallacy?
But they couldn’t be further from different. You have to have a health inspector visit your kitchen just to sell food at all. You need affirmative permission from the government to sell food.
> If I give away food I have a duty not to poison you. It doesn’t matter you didn’t pay for it.
If I invite you to eat at my house, there is no health inspector and no government. I'm just giving you free food. Would you agree that I have a duty not to poison you in that case?
This is absolutely true. On the other hand, if there's Vim, Neovim, emacs, MS Word, Google Docs etc and some treat me with respect and others do not, that might affect my choice of which software to use.
Sure. And likewise, users who care about backwards compatibility have no duty to do anything for the Neovim developers--they can simply use a different editor that suits their preferences.
They wrote this software with the explicit intention of offering it to other people to use. Their program deleted data created with a different program, on someone else’s computer. If they have no sense of duty that would preclude doing that, no one should use their software.
> They are open source developers, giving away free software as a gift. There is no duty here.
But actually there is! They didn't start from scratch. They took another very successfull and beloved project with the promise "to make it better". There is some promise here and the duty not to make it worse.
"Better" is subjective. They made it better...for themselves. Then gave it away so people who share their opinion, had the opportunity to choose to use it.
Sure. And nobody has a duty to use it.
This user states that (s)he doesn't want to use an editor that doesn't care for its users. I don't blame anyone here.
HN commenters constantly mistake “what I should do” with “what I am obligated to do.” Nobody is saying open source developers are legally mandated to be careful with user data. We are saying they should. There’s no need to haul out the license and put our lawyer hats on here. One can be within one’s legal rights and still be wrong.
To be fair some malware has a better support and care experience than some open source software. The malware actively encourages you to contact them to pay the ransom. The open source software, no such luck.
I already build software where I hold myself to a higher standard than malware, so not sure I get your point. Why not strive for a better world with good software?
Your suggestion that it is malware is misleading. Malware is “any software intentionally designed to harm, disrupt, or steal data from computers”. I sincerely doubt that was the author’s intention.
Everyone in open source is trying to write good software and the definition of good is subjective depending on overall design, features, ease of use, quality, and performance.
If an open source project is missing a feature, go build it. If the project maintainers don’t want it, fork the project. Be the change you want to see in the world. That’s the beauty of open source.
By your reasoning, a doctor who volunteers to provide free care to people has no duty of care to those patients. This is patently absurd - ethics and norms are a large part of what constitutes a professional.
And for what it's worth, I have flagged your comment for the inevitable pointless bickering it has precipitated. While applying reductionist frameworks and seeing where they lead is a necessary part of an individual's path to understanding, please avoid pushing ignorant assertions ("there is no duty here") as if they might constitute well reasoned truths.
There is not a duty but there is an image and quality issue. Something many open source projects suffer from and should not.
And even mentioning that results in "fork it if you're not happy" which immediately turns everyone off who's had to maintain a fork to fix a minor issue in something before. And anyone who can't fork it is being told to go to hell.
Everyone needs to quite frankly get off their high horse, crank the ego down and listen to users. Because you're damaging open source with the attitude.
30 years ago, things were better. They got a lot worse, particularly since github appeared.
Of course they do not. Read the licenses. They explicitly tell you that there is no warranty or fitness of purpose. It explicitly tells you that it is not fit for purpose. Expecting it to be is your own duty.
Talk about poor duty of care to users... been using him for 20 years and I have to enable it in my vimrc to take effect. So stupid. Why would I want this to be off?
It’s somewhat important for privacy reasons that the feature is opt-in. I don’t know if that’s the reason historically, but I wouldn’t want a text editor to persistently store a copy of everything I type without my consent. It’s almost like a keylogger.
Making privacy-sensitive features opt-in is a form of duty of care as well, to avert harm from the user.
They have very vocal and entrenched users that basically no defaults can be changed lest the single Amiga user will start a huge uproar.
And since they don't really have a BDFL or commercial pressure, they can be super detached even from standards or expectations that appeared 40 years ago.
Neovim was basically a reaction to that, for Vim, where they updated defaults to stuff basically every Unix editor since 2005 has.
Continuing the analogy - rather than a relationship that might even possibly include a duty of care, the relationship of the modern surveillance industry (Faceboot, Google, etc) to its "users" is that of arms manufacturers to military targets.
Unsaid in the blog post is that disabling persistant undo is one of the most common config changes for vim users who bother to set things up the way they like. Persistent undo is what causes your filesystem to be littered with tilde files, which have the same name but prefixed with a tilde. Every file you touch with vim gets a tilde version. Your ls output becomes polluted with noise.
> Apparently now they’re platforming white supremacists. I am completely unsurprised. Different facets of the same underlying attitude.
This was the end of the original Mastodon. Which is why I just can't with Mastodon or Bluesky. Casually tossing around ridiculous claims to back up an opinion on persistent undo.
Well in these ages of vibecoding. Maybe you are doing it for yourself. Or because you can? Actually caring of users hasn't been very high for most software for long time...
To be the devil’s advocate here, I think Vim needs less backwards compatibility, not more. In the sanctifying of “muscle memory” it completely stopped innovation, to the point of slowly drifting to obscurity.
Of the over a hundred students I taught when I helped out in uni, basically no one wanted to learn it, despite my enthusiasm.
And I sympathise. As I get older, I slowly grow more and more distaste for software that does not respect my time enough to give me properly-crafted defaults. Vim, in the age of modern editors, cannot compete. Not without 20 plugins with conflicting shortcuts and its self-imposed cliff of a learning curve.
And I’m saying this from a place of love; I’ve been using Vim (at least as a VSCode extension) every day for the last 10 years. But it never really grew up to the promise that the “Vim Creep” essay [1] gave me.
Vim is always going to be obscure because it's not obvious from looking at it how you use it. Muscle memory is the entire point. You don't need to change any keybinds, and I don't. I did feel discouraged to learn it at first because the people introducing it to me were doing pointlessly fancy things in it, some combination of custom keybinds and scripts to mass edit files.
As for default plugins, it'd be neat if they curated a set of optional ones, but nothing should be preinstalled.
The simpler and less contentious way to adopt innovations is to make a new tool with the innovation. For example, you might like https://helix-editor.com/
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 anyway.
I don't think there can really be any post-hoc justification of this.
https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/13973#issuecomment-789...
I switched from Vim to NeoVim this year, after about 15 years on Vim.
Not withstanding this incident, I would say that on the whole it has been a good experience with Neovim. (I didn’t actually ever use the persistent undo functionality in vim. Guess because of VCS it’s less needed for my use-case).
It was ostensibly necessary for other, arguably more important features. Persistent undo maybe just isn't that important? I certainly don't use it nearly as much as the author seems to.
As a Neovim user, this stopped me dead with painful realization: I may have suffered the same thing but didn't realize it. There was a time when I could not undo something, and it was after a Neovim upgrade.
Unlike Dr. Chisnall, I started my editor journey on Neovim, so it wasn't a transition that bit me. However, if the format of the persistent undo file is unstable, and Neovim just deletes it when it doesn't recognize the previous format, then it seems conceivable (to me) that an upgrade after changing the format would delete the file too.
Ouch. This is making me think about getting off of Neovim. Yes, FOSS comes as-is, but if there's an alternative...
Sorry for my ignorance, but what is the usefulness of undo persistence after a IDE restart? Don't you normally save your changes and finish a piece of work before exiting an DE?
Edit: some great examples in the replies here, thanks! Perhaps I should start using it in editors that support it, never gave it a thought before.
The whole point of undo is that you realize you made a mistake later. If you've done that after you've saved your changes and exited the program, you'd have no expectation of undo still working unless you've enabled this feature.
It doesn't matter whether or not you can think of a reason you would want to enable it, but it should be pretty trivial to do so. Once you've enabled it, it should work.
The reason why this feature is particularly useful in vi-likes is because they are not IDEs. I hop in and out of vi all day long. Depending on the task I might create a new tab, run a command in vi, or exit vi to run it. Vi’s appeal is that it is “just” an editor and your terminal and workstation form your un-integrated development environment.
The article gave 2 examples.
I can give some as well. IDE crashes. Computer reboots at an undesired time. Even if my work is saved, I am not “finished”. I would like my undo history to extend before file / open time.
I often use it to edit system config files, often on embedded devices where I don't have my git credentials setup, or on servers. In these cases we're already not in an ideal world, I don't have good reliable version control or change management in place. In those less-than-ideal worlds, having proper undo history is nice.
Most apps don't have it, so you might not be used to it, but have you never wished that you could undo the changes you made after you restarted the program?
Moreover, the vim history tracking is amazingly advanced. It's almost like a mini version control system. I highly recommend getting to know it.
If your session / computer crashes, for one.
It’s such an odd design decision.
I could see ignoring the old undo data or warning before discarding it but just silently wiping it is so user hostile it’s hard to comprehend.
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 ~/.vim/undo/. Data loss only occurs if both editors are configured to share an undo directory or save inline .un~ files.
I've used vim since the first time it appeared in Debian repos. I have been told a thousand times that NeoVim is better, more modern and solves many (conveniently never cited) issues. I just ignored it and carried on. Feeling terribly vindicated at this point as it's a feature I use regularly and have no idea that it would be an issue in NeoVim.
I've used vi and nvi and (now) vim, and tried neovim, but :! is broken and “Conform to POSIX vi” is one of their “Non-goals”.
I've never used NeoVim because Vim has been good enough.
I used neovim because it felt way faster by default. I think treesitter runs circles around what classic vim is using to highlight syntax. That said, I never used both beyond basics, thus no horror stories either.
I haven't noticed any performance issues in vim to start with. It was fast on a 75MHz pentium for me. The syntax highlighting, same. No issues. I don't always use that though because I can't be bothered to set up anything much past the basic config.
IIRC vim became really slow with the combination of large source files (thousands of lines of code) and language server plugins (e.g. code completion and live error squiggles).
I had a C program that was a single file 140,000 lines long back then. No issues.
I was using vim-enhanced as red hat-based distro installed it. No customization. No customization of nvim either.
I often use vim or nvim on disposable machines, so persistent undo is something very low on my list of things I want.
At one point vim lacked asynchronous plugins. If a plugin was running a builder or linter it locked the editor up (from what I recall).
That fell apart when people wanted vim to do some more modern IDE kind of things like all the “… on save” stuff (build on save, test, lint, etc). I think LSP support is native in neovim as well.
I believe vim merged asynchronous plugin support a while back though, so I’m not sure how different they really are anymore.
That seems like solving the wrong problem.
Just run make from another terminal...
*vimdicated
If one really needs an undo in today's day and age, use git.
It’s two different dimensions in this case. VCS doesn’t preserve your local history (in JetBrains’ terms) of changes (and it wasn’t meant to by design)
I don't use git. I actually have something still using RCS.
Someone didn't read the part about wanting a humane interface
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 have it hooked to my editor so that "save" is "check in". Now I have persistent, versioned, copies of all my states independent of whatever tools I happen to be using.
Type A. Type B. Save. Type C. Save. How do you get back to state “A” using git?
You do not have all your states available.
I was also a very early user of Neovim.
The way I personally remember it being positioned was “Vim, but with breaking changes.”
Yeah, this hasn't been a problem since forever (or at least I haven't noticed). They had to break the undo file format a while ago to actually work correctly for byte-level buffer change events (very important for tree sitter and other plugins listening for buffer changes). The undo file format is versioned, too, so it's not just YOLO'd; Neovim has since forever returned an error saying there's a version incompatibility. The outrage here doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
The original author of this post (on Mastodon) appears to have a bone to pick with Neovim since it's "platforming white supremacists"? I couldn't figure out what this meant. Some sort of internet drama I guess.
The “drama” was linked in TFA:
https://github.com/neovim/neovim.github.io/issues/501
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.
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).
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.
What seems to be the problem with that?
If illegal migrants are ruining your city, you should enforce the law. Its not rocket science
I got Streisanded into reading some of his quotes and they dont seem that bad.
The people who say that he is racist or fascist don’t believe that immigration can be illegal. That is, they believe that all migration should be allowed all of the time, and that successful countries should not be allowed to keep people out.
> 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 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.
This same article could've been written about how VIM has no native LSP integration or autocomplete and they don't have duty or care for their users.
Deleting important data without warning is not the same as not providing a feature users might want.
It's a feature most software doesn't even have, and it is off-by-default. If you rely on your undo history to store "important data", you are doing something horribly wrong - to the level of storing your critical emails in the Trash folder.
Persistent undo exists to recover from an accidental write-and-quit mid-session nuking some stuff you really didn't intend to delete. If you care about its contents beyond a handful of hours, you either need to adopt proper version management, or start making backups.
Reading the PR the change was needed because the old undofile format was fundamentally broken. They considered making an undofile-upgrade mechanism, but it would've caused more issues that it would've solved. In other words: stuck between a rock and a hard place.
A duty of care also means occasionally having to break things to make it better, or else you end up being stuck with spacebar heating[0] forever. As a user it does suck, but that's the price you have to pay for using actively-developed software.
[0]: https://xkcd.com/1172/
There is a flip side to this - is vim encrypting this data it keeps forever? If I delete something I consider sensitive, I might unwittingly be recording that presumed-deleted piece of data to my user profile somewhere to be deleted never.
That doesn't justify its deletion, it might justify warning the user, but unconditionally deleting data not owned by the app shared with other apps?
Vim's persist undo is disabled by default, perhaps for privacy reasons. edit: I see sebzim4500 got there first.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49867678
* https://bastian.rieck.me/blog/2015/persistent_undo_vim/
Stop looking for post-hoc justifications for behavior that is clearly wrong.
Second time in this thread you’re telling other people how to think and behave because they aren’t acting like you
OK and you are doing the dril wise man tweet sincerely
How could you possibly encrypt it in a way that holds water? Any attacker who cares enough to get your undo file can also get your undo keys, unless you want to wire a whole system of undo-now-requires-password-auth-with-MFA
Not really since the feature is opt in
It is insane that people are defending behavior that is clearly abhorrent just because they like the software. Are the claims even true? If they are, you should be updating your opinions about the person writing this software.
Insane? Abhorrent?
Relax for a second. Get some perspective.
My perspective is that the Neovim maintainer implemented a change that would delete data created by another program on other people's computers. They knew this would happen in advance, and it was done anyway.
From Cambridge Dictionary:
```markdown
abhorrent
/əbˈhɒr(ə)nt/
Abhorrent is an adjective that means morally very bad, hateful, or causing strong disgust and loathing.
```
I realise that this causes strong disgust and loathing in you, but can you please expand upon how it's morally very bad to prioritise speed and ease of use over undelete capability in Neovim? Are you unable to make backups or use Git?
All they had to do was pick a different file name
True. But it’s not like they planned some vengeance against the VIM backup file.
People are making it sound like this is a huge company with a product and not a grouping of curious people with a couple hours of free time on a Sunday.
Most likely they never thought about it, then it broke, then it was not impactful enough to fix on their free time compared to other stuff.
But they hold themselves out as being a normal software project, suitable for use by casual users. They even talk about having a "stable release" and advertise various sponsors.
If it's really just a toy with no expectation of not unexpectedly destroying user data then they ought to make that more clear.
They knew about it in advance. They decided people shouldn't care about that data.
https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/13973#issuecomment-789...
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 you use is open source. If you don't like it, have an agent change it! You don't need to convince a maintainer of anything.
More like in the LLM era, people are disrespecting the user and not sweating these details with ever increasing velocity. It isn't good.
This story is about software being a slow, deliberate process where a lack of gatekeeping can lead to data loss. This is the type of problem which is getting worse.
Software developers do sometimes make promises to their users, but I think these promises ought to be explicit rather than assumed. You can't simply assume a "duty of care" and expect that other people will understand them the same way you do.
(Or rather, you can, but you will likely be disappointed.)
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 don't care about the users because of this is really disrespectful.
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.
[delayed]
https://xkcd.com/1172/
Seems so. As smart as keeping tabs open in browser instead of using bookmarks, but "workflow".
Btw zen browser's folders are many streets ahead of Firefox's traditional bookmarking.
duty of care is kinda absent in too much of software engineering. its painfully missing in recent anthropic models because of the broken value framework they use for ethics. but broadly: i currently have the stance that text gen language models should prioritize users wellbeing rather than model orovider liability
"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 feel good about what you create.
That stands in stark contrast today, where things are more hostile. Not just in terms of "Dark patterns", or writing off user needs for the sake of expediency... but even the way we talk about technology today. You need to use X, do Y or you're "not going to make it" / "escape the permanent underclass". It's bleak.
I recently restored a vintage Macintosh SE I picked up at VCF Midwest and despite its limitations that machine was an absolute JOY to use despite its limitations and nearly 40 years of age. This was a machine and software designed by Raskin's contemporaries and it shows.
> but even the way we talk about technology today. You need to use X, do Y or you're "not going to make it" / "escape the permanent underclass". It's bleak.
That's just how people market things these days, preying on desperation and fear of missing out. It's not how normal humans talk, I hope.
Software’s purpose is clearly shifting from “what’s good for the user” to “what’s good for the developer.” Instead of enabling me, software now seeks to lock me in. Instead of making my life easier, software decisions are made based on what makes developers’ jobs easier. Instead of being careful with my data, software now comes with giant legal terms that allow developers to be utterly careless with it. Software is now designed primarily to funnel money to the developer, not to bring joy to the user.
And look at this article’s HN discussion. Many people indignantly defending it. “It’s open source. If you don’t like it deleting your data, don’t use it!”
They are open source developers, giving away free software as a gift. There is no duty here.
We can speak, respectfully, of how important backwards compatibility is to us, and ask nicely for them to give more of their time to support it when their free sodftware isn't backwards compatible. Perhaps we can even offer to help implement it.
But they have no duty to do so or to "care" for their users. (They have already demonstrated they care for their users, btw, by giving them free software.)
EDIT: I missed an important part of the story, which is that they mutated existing files in a non-backwards compatible manner. That should have been avoided, I understand where the (secondary) author is coming from now.
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 people using it, you emphatically have a duty to those people not to silently destroy stuff that was there before your software was.
It's worth pointing out that vim is not "another program" as far as Neovim is concerned. It's an earlier version of the same program. Neovim is a fork of vim, not a totally different editor that happens to share part of a name.
Forking creates new programs.
If I fork chromium, I do not get to claim that I am a chromium maintainer.
Vim and Neovim are two seperate programs.
So maybe it should have two different undo files so both can be run side by side?
Exactly and I think it does this by default now, but I have not checked.
It absolutely is another program, I can tell this because it has a different name. To run it I type "nvim" instead of "vim". I use different config files to control its behavior. I install a different package on my system when I want to use it on a new computer.
> giving away free software as a gift
Even a gift comes with an implicit promise that it will do no harm. Deleting important data of yours without warning is harm.
This gift comes with the following clauses listed plainly in the license file:
It's genuinely mind-blowing to me that software can do something obviously bad, someone can point it out, and then someone will link to the license file to say they have the right to do it.
That's such an obvious category mistake that I'm not sure how to respond. It almost feels like a bad-faith interpretation of Wichary's original point.
Equally mindblowing that folks feel someone hacking on open source software has an obligation to do anything the way they feel it needs to be done when the whole point is that anyone gets to do more or less what they want with the code.
You can't have both.
They get to do more or less what they want with the software, and others get to say more or less what they want about that. What's wrong with deciding they've crossed a line, being bothered by that, and warning others? Nobody's trying to get the law involved, or maliciously retaliate against them, or anything like that.
I published my comment for free, and yet you are criticizing it.
"My software ran rm -rf / but it's GPL so sucks to be you"
> has an obligation to do anything the way they feel it needs to be done
> anyone gets to do more or less what they want with the code
so if the software had explicitly installed a root kit, you'd say the same?
If you give out free soup, you get to poison it too?
I don't think anyone is looking for legal remedies, this is not the right layer.
Is some part of:
"Licensor provides the Work (and each Contributor provides its Contributions) on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied, including, without limitation, any warranties or conditions of TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE."
Unclear? The fact that it's part of a license does not make it a legal-system-only warning.
The software might eat your dog, and feed your homework. Run it at your own risk, and be prepared to submit patches or fork it to make it behave the way one prefers.
Is the fact that we are not discussing legal remedies in this thread unclear?
This is one of the most exhausting (and frankly, exhausted) recurring arguments that comes up over and over again on HN.
Some bit of open source software does something bad or unwanted which causes people point out that it shouldn't do that bad thing. In this case, not even "the authors of this software should be held liable for the software doing the bad thing", just, "Hey, the right thing to do would be to update the software to not do the bad thing."
Why does this always lead a zillion people to come out of the woodwork to point at licenses and warnings or whatever? Like, yes, there's a warning. Your software having a warning doesn't mean people can't criticize you and your software for doing bad thing. Your software license does not give you immunity from criticism or from people saying you should change your software.
No, you don't have to change the software. Yes, other people are within their rights to fork the software themselves. But they can also point out that they told you that your software was doing the bad thing and you didn't fix it or change it, and that as a result they don't like you or your software or both — whatever. Nothing at all wrong with that.
Such a disclaimer does not even remove all legal liability, it just reduces it.
The software might eat your dog, and feed your homework
Sure, and when it does we can say “this piece of shit ate my dog, and the authors of the software have no concept of a duty of care to their users”. And no amount of “well, axually…” is going to make any difference. I have a hard believing someone is copy-pasting a license file in good faith in response.
Most open source software is written by individuals who aren't paid for the effort, and are solving their own problems. Presuming that they feel an obligation to the folks who download and use their work for free seems... bold.
If my neighbor mows my lawn for free, I'm not going to complain about his workmanship. If I want the job done a particular way, the solution is to do it myself, or pay someone to do it the way I like.
Suppose that you build a childrens' slide in your front garden. You put up a big sign saying "Consider using my slide! https://neovim.io/ Here are several wonderful things about it. It's free for everyone!" in your yard. Underneath in smaller letters you add "[No liability]". You also put up noticeboard ads for your free kids' slide in neighbourhood shopping malls https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/neovim https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Neovim . Unfortunately, when you built the slide, you left sharp metal edges and corners sticking far up on the inside, reaching into the path of the user. No reasonably competent and diligent metalworker or slide-maker would have failed to notice these major flaws or failed to understand the serious danger they represented. Several neighbourhood children use the slide and receive serious gashes to the legs, arms or face, and have to go to the hospital. Even assuming that your no-liability small print somehow had you free and clear legally, do you believe that your behaviour would have been ethically and morally above all criticism? Do you think that "should have read the small print!" or "can't I build what I like in my own front yard?!" would have you covered? Do you think that your family and friends would agree?
> If my neighbor mows my lawn for free, I'm not going to complain about his workmanship. If I want the job done a particular way, the solution is to do it myself, or pay someone to do it the way I like.
I think this is a decent analogy, but it works better the other way. If my neighbour offers to mow my lawn, I accept, and then he destroys the flower bed adjacent to the lawn, I will be upset, and I will have every right to complain about what he did. If he reacts by blithely dismissing my concern, then I certainly have the right (and arguably the obligation) to warn others that they should think twice about accepting his offers of gardening assistance.
Some expectations reasonably go without saying; "don't destroy my flower bed when mowing my lawn" is one, and IMO "don't destroy my data without a clear warning and a chance to back out" is another, though of course we might disagree about exactly where this does and doesn't apply.
If my neighbor mows my lawn for free, and in the process mows my flower garden down, things change a bit though don't they. That is a closer analogy. In that case I am going to complain, and maybe also tell everybody he's careless and not to let him near their lawns.
If my neighbor mows my lawn and ruins my whole garden, I'd definitely complain. (And if I were in the neighbor's shoes, I'd feel awful about it and try to fix things.)
There's a long literary tradition of representing contracts as a tool of villainy. Signing them is generally treated as a Faustian bargain.
This is a great example of why. Most humans have a sense, deep down, that contracts often exist to bridge the gulf between the ethically defensible and the legally defensible.
It's hard to imagine that any sane person who is just looking to use a popular editor would read some broad limitation of liability language like the above, and interpret it to mean, "By the way, we intend to quietly delete certain files created by a competing fork of this project whenever we find them."
It's true that contracts with liability limitation clauses like this are an absolute necessity in this day and age. But there's also a non-legal principle of mutual respect that is absolutely necessary to a healthy open source community.
> It's hard to imagine that any sane person who is just looking to use a popular editor would read some broad limitation of liability language like the above, and interpret it to mean, "By the way, we intend to quietly delete certain files created by a competing fork of this project whenever we find them."
Forks of projects trodding all over each others files is one of the more common problems that has happened, historically. Prior to the major efforts around freedesktop.org around configuration standardization, it was quite common. It'd be one of the first things I looked for when switching to a fork.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I’m saying it shouldn’t be defended as good. It’s a defect. And in this particular incarnation it’s a defect that directly clashes with fundamental Free Software principles such as personal digital sovereignty.
I also suspect that few people actually believe it’s ok and these legalistic defenses are more about circling the wagons. How many people would defend Microsoft if a new Office version automatically and quietly stripped edit history from documents that were originally created by other versions? Would we be hunting for limited liability clauses in their EULA to defend the design decision?
I am never going to use any software you have written.
“Here, take this car, it’s free!”
“Ow, the gas pedal is actually a bear trap.”
“Why are you complaining? It’s free!”
This is a very apt analogy. If you give someone a car (or sell it cheap) and you know there is a problem with the car, then it is your duty to tell them. "Hey, I've been having trouble with the breaks they need to be pumped. Be careful about that."
Then you don't take the car. Why is this confusing?
That's not how liability works, not either morally or (IANAL) legally.
Because you didn't find out it was a bear trap until after you stepped on it?
Ah, yes. The old story of the one-footed man who didn't take the car.
Well I would feel slightly irate if I had to find out about the bear trap before I decide I don’t want the car.
That’s fine, you can leave the car, but you’ve already lost your foot. Why do you find this confusing?
You discover it’s a bear trap not before you try to pull out from the parking lot.
A duty, like a responsibility, can be something you feel or choose for yourself. The fact that the maintainers of some software don’t feel it is a perfectly good argument for not using that software. There is no necessary connection to compensation or transactional thinking.
If I give away food I have a duty not to poison you. It doesn’t matter you didn’t pay for it.
Others are eating it and are fine, chances are you’re allergic. Fortunately all ingredients are listed, you can check - or even modify the recipe yourself.
> Fortunately all ingredients are listed
How does this translate to the vim situation?
It's not poison, it's a broken feature. And you have the source code. Fix it if you like.
Sure, and then have it break again the next time upstream pushes a change. Or have something else break because upstream doesn't care about breaking things that I'm relying on.
The only way to "fix" this from a source code perspective would be to fork Neovim.
Software isn’t food.
So software that deletes important data of yours without any warning is ok because at least it isn't poisoning you?
If you have to twist things so far that intent doesn’t matter, something’s wrong.
According to TFA, it was completely intentional that they deleted someone’s data that had been created with a different program. Otherwise they would have acknowledged it was a bug. I do not know if this is true, only that it is what TFA claims.
It’s not great that Neovim destroyed/replaced files that aren’t clearly under its purview. They should have probably also made the consideration that a lot of Neovim users are going to be migrating from Vim.
Maybe if they’re making their own persistent undo standard, use different file naming conventions.
That said, as a fork of Vim, maybe the Neovim authors are at least partially reasonable in assuming that you’re not running multiple forks of Vim that could then potentially conflict with each other. It just sucks that they never really thought of a migration path for this particular feature.
Yes, everyone is aware of that. The parent poster was bringing up the example of food to demonstrate that our society does not agree that giving something away for free doesn't mean you have no obligation as to potential adverse effects of the thing.
That is why software should have very large liability for anything software they release do? Say your software due to bug destroys some document. Surely you should pay damages caused by such bug even if quite high?
Analogies like this don’t work when comparing against heavily regulated industry.
Neovim being free software is a lot different than United Airlines giving me a free flight or my doctor giving me a free consultation.
It’s very true that you can go to civil court and make a claim that a business or individual harmed you. If you do that with Neovim the judge is going to pretty quickly read bullet point #7 of the Apache 2.0 license, you’re going to struggle to prove any kind of mal-intent, you’re going to tell the judge that you paid $0 for the software, and you’ll be pretty quickly sent along your way with no damages awarded.
Only in the sense there's no explicit legal responsibility.
Do you really believe developers have exactly zero moral responsibility to their users? None at all?
Really?
Would you still believe that if you found the developers of ssh deliberately included a backdoor for hackers, or neovim was uploading everyone's code to the NSA?
I never said developers have no responsibility. Let’s not escalate. Now we are talking about actively malicious software versus a bug or design flaw.
This issue with Neovim sounds like less than ideal design, or a bug, or both, not some kind of intentional affront to users.
You must feel clever completely missing the point on purpose like that.
"Your analogy is false because the two things you are comparing are not literally the same, dear sir!" is such a classic Internet discussion trope that it must have a name. If it doesn't, can I please name it? Maybe Perfect Analogy Fallacy?
But they couldn’t be further from different. You have to have a health inspector visit your kitchen just to sell food at all. You need affirmative permission from the government to sell food.
The original analogy was not about selling food:
> If I give away food I have a duty not to poison you. It doesn’t matter you didn’t pay for it.
If I invite you to eat at my house, there is no health inspector and no government. I'm just giving you free food. Would you agree that I have a duty not to poison you in that case?
This guy you are arguing with is classic troll, he does it on every topic. Just ignore and don't reply.
Yeah, people like him is what the doenvote button is intended for.
Food is one of the more heavily regulated industries out there. Most other general business types are less regulated than food.
This is absolutely true. On the other hand, if there's Vim, Neovim, emacs, MS Word, Google Docs etc and some treat me with respect and others do not, that might affect my choice of which software to use.
Sure. And likewise, users who care about backwards compatibility have no duty to do anything for the Neovim developers--they can simply use a different editor that suits their preferences.
Is there a good way to avoid programs like this in general?
You buy software that includes a commercial license that guarantees data retention
So that answer us no because such software does virtually not exist.
They wrote this software with the explicit intention of offering it to other people to use. Their program deleted data created with a different program, on someone else’s computer. If they have no sense of duty that would preclude doing that, no one should use their software.
> They are open source developers, giving away free software as a gift. There is no duty here.
But actually there is! They didn't start from scratch. They took another very successfull and beloved project with the promise "to make it better". There is some promise here and the duty not to make it worse.
"Better" is subjective. They made it better...for themselves. Then gave it away so people who share their opinion, had the opportunity to choose to use it.
[delayed]
It would be really surprising if they could make it better for literally every user. The perpetual undo is just better handled by git.
And this obligation lasts… for the rest of their lives?
Sure. And nobody has a duty to use it. This user states that (s)he doesn't want to use an editor that doesn't care for its users. I don't blame anyone here.
"Behold my glorious generosity, which eclipses your petty meaningless little data!"
This is the extreme version of "I enjoy coding but I hate users."
It may be legally valid in absolute technical terms, but I'm going to take a lot of persuading that it's a healthy attitude.
HN commenters constantly mistake “what I should do” with “what I am obligated to do.” Nobody is saying open source developers are legally mandated to be careful with user data. We are saying they should. There’s no need to haul out the license and put our lawyer hats on here. One can be within one’s legal rights and still be wrong.
If people can be upset when llms delete a file, we can be upset when an open-source project deletes a file.
Ill remember this when I distribute malware.
To be fair some malware has a better support and care experience than some open source software. The malware actively encourages you to contact them to pay the ransom. The open source software, no such luck.
Oh my. This set of principles is appropriate for malware.
If you don’t like how it works, go build your own.
I already build software where I hold myself to a higher standard than malware, so not sure I get your point. Why not strive for a better world with good software?
Your suggestion that it is malware is misleading. Malware is “any software intentionally designed to harm, disrupt, or steal data from computers”. I sincerely doubt that was the author’s intention.
Everyone in open source is trying to write good software and the definition of good is subjective depending on overall design, features, ease of use, quality, and performance.
If an open source project is missing a feature, go build it. If the project maintainers don’t want it, fork the project. Be the change you want to see in the world. That’s the beauty of open source.
> giving away free software as a gift. There is no duty here.
By that logic, if Facebook gives away their services for free then they don't have the duty to protect their user's privacy and mental health?
By your reasoning, a doctor who volunteers to provide free care to people has no duty of care to those patients. This is patently absurd - ethics and norms are a large part of what constitutes a professional.
And for what it's worth, I have flagged your comment for the inevitable pointless bickering it has precipitated. While applying reductionist frameworks and seeing where they lead is a necessary part of an individual's path to understanding, please avoid pushing ignorant assertions ("there is no duty here") as if they might constitute well reasoned truths.
There is not a duty but there is an image and quality issue. Something many open source projects suffer from and should not.
And even mentioning that results in "fork it if you're not happy" which immediately turns everyone off who's had to maintain a fork to fix a minor issue in something before. And anyone who can't fork it is being told to go to hell.
Everyone needs to quite frankly get off their high horse, crank the ego down and listen to users. Because you're damaging open source with the attitude.
30 years ago, things were better. They got a lot worse, particularly since github appeared.
You spewing bs like the left-pad dev who removed it from NPM a decade ago crashing everything.
Yes, OSS can start with just a passion without a duty, but as the scale grows you have a duty to make sure it does not have adverse effect.
If you don't like the duty, just make it die by building it crappy like VIM does.
>I deleted something from this file, maybe last week
Don't forget time travel: `:earlier 7d`
Of course they do not. Read the licenses. They explicitly tell you that there is no warranty or fitness of purpose. It explicitly tells you that it is not fit for purpose. Expecting it to be is your own duty.
Awkwardly speaking, Microsoft Word is a great example of a program that appreciates backward compatibility.
How does one use persistent undo in vim?
Talk about poor duty of care to users... been using him for 20 years and I have to enable it in my vimrc to take effect. So stupid. Why would I want this to be off?
Such amazing design...
" Enable persistent undo set undofile
It’s somewhat important for privacy reasons that the feature is opt-in. I don’t know if that’s the reason historically, but I wouldn’t want a text editor to persistently store a copy of everything I type without my consent. It’s almost like a keylogger.
Making privacy-sensitive features opt-in is a form of duty of care as well, to avert harm from the user.
Edit history in JetBrains being on by default saved my bacon a few times over the years.
Emacs and Vim are basically like that.
They have very vocal and entrenched users that basically no defaults can be changed lest the single Amiga user will start a huge uproar.
And since they don't really have a BDFL or commercial pressure, they can be super detached even from standards or expectations that appeared 40 years ago.
Neovim was basically a reaction to that, for Vim, where they updated defaults to stuff basically every Unix editor since 2005 has.
VIM should be in the title here as well
That’s why I stopped getting all those swap file messages every time I opened vim…
Continuing the analogy - rather than a relationship that might even possibly include a duty of care, the relationship of the modern surveillance industry (Faceboot, Google, etc) to its "users" is that of arms manufacturers to military targets.
Unsaid in the blog post is that disabling persistant undo is one of the most common config changes for vim users who bother to set things up the way they like. Persistent undo is what causes your filesystem to be littered with tilde files, which have the same name but prefixed with a tilde. Every file you touch with vim gets a tilde version. Your ls output becomes polluted with noise.
> Apparently now they’re platforming white supremacists. I am completely unsurprised. Different facets of the same underlying attitude.
This was the end of the original Mastodon. Which is why I just can't with Mastodon or Bluesky. Casually tossing around ridiculous claims to back up an opinion on persistent undo.
yea i found that a bit odd to throw in right at the end there. i dont really understand what that means
Are you responding to the wrong post? This isn't anywhere in TFA
It's in the first link in the post.
TLDR: Neovim did a breaking change to persistent undo
That is not the story here. The story is Neovim deleted data created by another program, on someone else's computer.
I don't know if this story is true, but you can't defend it when taken at face value.
I think this might not be clear on the issue, it broke vim's undo file, as in it deleted it and replaced it with Neovims version.
Just by trying Neovim you can lose your vim undo file.
This is the crux of the matter. I wish a few of the "its OSS" commentators here would read this.
…and even trying Neovim out on a file permanently deletes your undo history for that file, even if you switch back to vim.
It’s Open source.
Some people just want to keep looking at the gift horse in the mouth.
As an open source developer I hate this attitude. If you do not care about the users why are you even releasing the software?
Well in these ages of vibecoding. Maybe you are doing it for yourself. Or because you can? Actually caring of users hasn't been very high for most software for long time...
Because they care about a different subset of the users? You can’t make everybody happy.
It’s a free country.
To be the devil’s advocate here, I think Vim needs less backwards compatibility, not more. In the sanctifying of “muscle memory” it completely stopped innovation, to the point of slowly drifting to obscurity.
Of the over a hundred students I taught when I helped out in uni, basically no one wanted to learn it, despite my enthusiasm.
And I sympathise. As I get older, I slowly grow more and more distaste for software that does not respect my time enough to give me properly-crafted defaults. Vim, in the age of modern editors, cannot compete. Not without 20 plugins with conflicting shortcuts and its self-imposed cliff of a learning curve.
And I’m saying this from a place of love; I’ve been using Vim (at least as a VSCode extension) every day for the last 10 years. But it never really grew up to the promise that the “Vim Creep” essay [1] gave me.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190227031109/https://www.norfo...
:wq
Vim is always going to be obscure because it's not obvious from looking at it how you use it. Muscle memory is the entire point. You don't need to change any keybinds, and I don't. I did feel discouraged to learn it at first because the people introducing it to me were doing pointlessly fancy things in it, some combination of custom keybinds and scripts to mass edit files.
As for default plugins, it'd be neat if they curated a set of optional ones, but nothing should be preinstalled.
The simpler and less contentious way to adopt innovations is to make a new tool with the innovation. For example, you might like https://helix-editor.com/