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.

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.

The data is stored in ~/.cache which has the contract that it user-wide cached data, which also means it can be deleted without severely impacting programs.

It seems the author has too high expectations of this feature, or vim is using an incorrect path to store this is they want to make it available more reliably

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 accidentally delete your data? I don’t think it’s that bad personally. It’s bound to happen but it’s not automatic.

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.

maybe they tried to undo the change, but were not able to