Let a host be moved to another vault

The one thing the host editor's vault picker has always been unable to offer,
and the comment beside it said so: an existing host's vault was not a field
because the two vaults are encrypted under different keys. That is still true.
What changed is that it is no longer a reason to have nothing.

**A move is a copy and a tombstone, and it cannot be anything else.** A payload
is sealed under its vault's key and its AAD binds the vault, the entity id and
the item version, so no edit moves one and no server call could — the server
holds ciphertext it cannot read. What crosses is the plaintext, in this process,
between an unwrap under one key and a seal under another. VaultItemRepository
gained MoveAsync for it, so the three decisions below live in one place with
their reasons rather than being re-derived at each call site.

The item takes a new id. Keeping it would put one entity id in two vaults, and
the item table is keyed on the type and the id rather than on the vault — so the
destination's row and the source's tombstone would be the same row, and the move
would delete what it had just written.

The write comes first and the tombstone second, which decides what an
interruption leaves: a copy in both vaults, visible and deletable, rather than a
tombstone with nothing on the other side. Both are queued rather than sent, so
the window is a crash between two local writes; it is still worth being on the
survivable side of.

Two activity lines rather than one, because that is what the two vaults actually
record. A single "moved" line would have to be written to one of them and would
be missing from the other's history.

**The group and the tags stay behind, and that is the half that makes this
honest.** Both are items of the vault the host is leaving: the editor's group
picker offers one vault's groups and the chips are drawn from one vault's tags.
A host carrying either across would resolve it on the machine that moved it —
groups and tags are resolved over every readable vault — and dangle for everybody
else in the destination. The mover and their colleagues would be looking at two
different hosts. Cleared and reported beats carried and invisible.

The key or password binding is kept, and the difference is not inconsistency.
Those genuinely resolve across vaults — one key on twenty hosts in three vaults
is the arrangement they exist for — so clearing them would take a working host
and make one that cannot connect. What the message does instead is name a
binding that is now outside the destination, because that is precisely what the
other members of it will not be able to resolve.

**It is not in the editor**, on either head: the desktop puts it in the detail
pane's ⋯ menu above the separator Delete sits below, and the phone beside EDIT.
A picker inside the form would move a machine as a side effect of correcting a
port, which is the bug the editor's own vault picker was fenced off to prevent in
the first place. The panel takes the footer as the deletion question does, and
says what will be left behind before the tap rather than after it — on a phone,
where the status line afterwards is one line on a screen somebody has already
navigated away from, that is the only place it reliably gets read.

The phone hides the button where there is nowhere to go rather than offering one
that answers with a refusal; the desktop keeps its menu entry either way, because
a menu that grew and shrank would be a menu whose items move.

One thing found while writing the test and deliberately not changed. The pass
that follows every write on this screen reports what it moved and supersedes the
confirmation — for a save and a delete as much as for a move — so the move's own
sentence is what somebody sees offline. The test asserts it in that state and
says why. Making confirmations survive their own sync pass is a question about
the whole screen rather than about this.

Four places said an item could never be moved, two of them sentences on screen in
both heads. All four now say what is true, including the design gaps document,
where the chevron beside the vault name stays undrawn for a different reason: a
chevron on a subtitle implies an edit, and this is a re-seal, a new id and two
references left behind.
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-04 16:04:15 +02:00
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commit bee6202949
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@@ -342,10 +342,16 @@ Six limits, stated rather than discovered:
into it that is not there.
Items are filed into one vault at a time, and which one is asked at the moment the item is made. **A host's
editor has its own picker**, beside the name, because that is the decision that cannot be undone: the two
vaults are encrypted under different keys, so moving an item afterwards means deleting it and typing it
again — and the picker is therefore absent when you edit an existing host rather than present and refusing.
Keys, passwords and buckets take theirs from a standing "new items go to" picker on the Keychain screen.
editor has its own picker**, beside the name, because it is the decision on that form that decides who can
read the host. It is absent when you edit an existing one rather than present and refusing, and that is not
because the host is stuck: **a host can be moved to another vault** — "Move to another vault…" in the detail
pane's menu on the desktop, MOVE beside EDIT on the phone. It is a separate act because it is not a save.
The two vaults are encrypted under different keys, so a move is a re-seal into one and a tombstone in the
other; the host gets a new id, and **its group and its tags stay behind**, because both are items of the
vault it is leaving. A picker inside the form would do all of that as a side effect of correcting a port.
What a move cannot do is reach a machine that has already synced the host, which is the same limit
everything else about revocation has. Keys, passwords and buckets take theirs from a standing "new items go
to" picker on the Keychain screen and cannot be moved yet.
Both default to your personal vault and neither moves on its own, because an item put in a shared vault is
visible to everybody holding that vault's key. Choosing a vault in the host editor also decides which groups
it can be filed under: a group is an item like any other and lives in exactly one vault.