can we have a stable format for settings.json or at least have a mechanism to make it backword compatible?

[pravi]

Description of the problem or steps to reproduce

Use micro 2.x and 1.4 interchangeably leads to crash of

Details here https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=952111#10

Ideal thing would be to not change the settings.json often or if it has to make it in a way that older versions can ignore things it does not understand. or at the minimum give a better error message if settings.json format is not understood. Having versions for the settings.json format will help to check compatibility easily.

[sta-c0000]

Hi,
I agree that some sort of settings version check could be helpful, but perhaps the idea that micro has "change the settings.json often" is not accurate; it's been several years since there has been a new major version of micro. I also personally don't think it's entirely unreasonable for major versions to be incompatible with older ones. So perhaps we're just looking at a better error message in the future.

Considering that micro is released as a single portable binary with no dependencies, I don't see why you "need to use both versions". You can simply download the latest binary from the official micro releases and use that same version in your multi-OS-releases home directory (e.g. ~/bin/micro).

Just my opinion, cheers.