I can imagine any number of situations where it might be wanted. Keep the file open in vim, changes are made from somewhere else, but you'd like to keep the ori

I can imagine any number of situations where it might be wanted. Keep the file open in vim, changes are made from somewhere else, but you'd like to keep the original version, so you :w. It makes sense to me the :write actually writes regardless of context (assuming sufficient permissions) and with no hidden conditions like "something must have changed". That kind of thing leads to weird user behavior like editing whitespace just to be able to re-save a file.