tolaria/docs/adr/0045-permanent-delete-no-trash.md

type, id, title, status, date, supersedes

type	id	title	status	date	supersedes
ADR	0045	Permanent delete with confirm modal — no Trash system	active	2026-04-07	0042

Context

ADR-0042 designed a Trash auto-purge safety model (soft-delete with 30-day retention, OS trash via trash crate, audit log). This was built on top of a Trash system that treated deletion as a two-phase operation: move to trash → auto-purge after 30 days.

The Trash system was subsequently identified as unnecessary complexity: it required trashed/trashedAt frontmatter fields, sidebar filtering, editor banners, inspector components, dedicated smoke tests, and a trash crate dependency. The safety guarantee users actually need is a confirmation prompt before irreversible action, not a soft-delete buffer — especially given notes live in a git repo (vault git history is already a recovery mechanism per ADR-0034 and ADR-0014).

Commit e581ad36 on 2026-04-06 removed the entire Trash system (123 files changed, ~3164 lines deleted).

Decision

Delete is permanent and immediate, gated only by a confirmation modal (useDeleteActions). Notes with trashed: true in existing vault frontmatter are treated as normal notes (the flag is ignored by the parser). The trash crate dependency is removed.

The confirmation modal is the sole safety gate. No soft-delete, no Trash view, no auto-purge scheduler, no .laputa/purge.log.

Options considered

• Option A — Permanent delete + confirm modal (chosen): simple, honest, no hidden state. Git history provides recovery. Removes ~3000 lines of code and a platform-specific dependency. Downside: no in-app recovery path for users who don't know about git.
• Option B — OS Trash via trash crate (ADR-0042, now superseded): soft-delete to OS Trash, user can recover from macOS Trash app. Downside: additional dependency, complex auto-purge scheduler, misleading "auto-purge" promise that was never actually implemented.
• Option C — .laputa/deleted/ archive folder: custom recovery mechanism inside vault. Downside: clutters vault, users wouldn't know to look there, still requires manual cleanup.

Consequences

• Users who accidentally delete a note must recover from git history (git checkout HEAD -- path/to/note.md) — this is a power-user action
• trashed/trashedAt frontmatter fields in existing vaults are silently ignored — no migration needed, no data loss
• The trash crate is removed from Cargo.toml — build times improve marginally
• Smoke tests for trash flows are deleted; delete-related test coverage is now purely the confirm modal behavior
• The Trash view, sidebar filter, note banners, and bulk-trash actions are all gone — simpler UI surface
• Re-evaluate if user feedback shows significant accidental deletion incidents, or if git-based recovery proves too inaccessible for non-technical users