Withdraw your library because there is another one better: It's something nice!

In 2019 (almost 4 years ago) I wrote an article about how to handle a custom v-model in Vue 2 (Spanish), in that article I explained how to create a custom v-model in Vue 2, the good practices synchronizing the prop and the internal status and how to avoid the warning message “Avoid mutating a prop directly since the value will be overwritten whenever the parent component re-renders. Instead, use a data or computed property based on the prop’s value.”

Summarizing, the strategy was to create a local variable that will be the one that will be modified by the input and that will emit the event to the parent component, and a watcher that will be in charge of modifying the local variable when the prop changes.

A year and a half later when the composition API came to Vue2, and after bing bored with repeating the “same” code in each component to keep the status in sync, I decided to create a library to simplify this task, that is how vue-use-model-helpers was born.

This library was very useful for me and the teams I worked on, and We used it in several personal and professional projects simplifying a lot of our work.

When Vue 3 was released, I created a new version specific to this version, and I started to think about making the library compatible with Vue 2 and Vue 3 at the same time and improving the TypeScript support. To do that I found vue-demi and in this process, I discovered vue-use and a really amazing library.

This library includes the composable useVModel that does the same that my library does but better.

Even more, reading about the Vue compiler macros I found the macro defineModels that uses vue-use under the hood and allows you to create a custom v-model in a very simple way.

So,

I decided to deprecate my library and strongly recommend using vue-use instead.

What about the projects that are using vue-use-model-helpers?

Nothing, they can still use it as before, but the migration to useVModel is quite simple, just replace the import and replace the useModel function with useVModel adding the options { passive: true } and you will get the same behavior.

Should I think that is a defeat?

I don’t think so. I think is a win for me: I learned a lot in the process of creating the library, we were using a lot and it was very helpful, we could use this behavior almost a year before useVModel were released.

And internally I feel quite nice that the community and widely adopted solution to this problem be very similar to the solution I designed and created. I feel proud of that.

But as I mentioned, makes no sense to keep maintaining a library that is not necessary anymore, now it is time to move on and try (if it’s possible) to contribute to vue-use (not only about useVModel), I love Vue composition API and composable, I feel them very useful and powerful.