Clarify project status #3811
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Really hope this project continues / grows / thrives, I LOVE this editor, bought a license, became a patreon supporter, and I cannot wait to get debugger, bracket colorizers, bugfixes etc :) . |
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Hi @likern @jerabaul29 - Thanks for your concern for the project (and the really kind words of encouragement @jerabaul29 - means a lot to me!) Certainly overdue for a status update, and it's been a pretty hectic couple of months for me. The TL;DR is that, unfortunately, I'm unable to sustain full-time development - I ran out of $ - but I'm trying to carve out time to work on it on the side. Just been a transition time for me. Here's what I've been up to the last couple months: In July, I was trying to find some other options for funding, and I spent most of the month pitching to VCs (putting together pitch decks, meeting VCs, follow-up meetings, etc). Unfortunately, none of the VCs were interested... a native, desktop code editor is a pretty tough sell! In August, after failing to raise funds, I spent time dusting off my resume, interviewing, etc - I accepted a full-time offer with a really cool product / team that's still in the dev tools space. Been building a new routine and starting a new job, which has taken up most of my time. Once I get into the rhythm, I'd like to keep working on Onivim on the side (but, of course, free-time work will be slower than full-time). It's been a bit of a rough stretch... but I'm incredibly thankful for all the help and support 🙏 The main thing on my mind at this point is, given the fact that I can't sustain full-time development - how can I maximize the value for everyone who helped us get Onivim this far? Some things I've been thinking about:
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This is very understandable @bryphe . Best of luck with your new work. Truly hope you continue working on oni2 on the side, but yes side projects is tough. A few thoughts:
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Thank you for your try, it was very promising project. I hope you to succeed on a new job. I think open-sourcing is not a very good idea. Because there's almost 100% no one will actively contribute (excluding minor patches which doesn't help much). It's all my experience giving this. I've seen so much failed / abandoned projects and almost no one was picked up by someone else, excluding commercial companies (for commercial perspective). Numerous top-level projects are struggling with millions downloads per week and thousands companies using it actively. Like TypeORM in JS world and Sequalize. And you are using niche programming language. Open-sourcing means zero chances to get funding. I see the only option to continue trying get VC funding. It might be in another contries like in Europe, Arabic countries, etc. Also quite strange no funding giving the fact how successful was Jetbrains (Intellij IDEA), I think they are very financially successful. Also I think it was too broad scope with supporting a lot of plugins and languages. It much better to concentrate only on one thing and doing it very well, adding new languages and it's specific tools later. I think supporting just JavaScript and Typescript (giving the fact how popular they are) are very good chance to get funding from users. You can continue with ONI 1 and integrate back changes from ONI 2, if it's possible. Frankly speaking abandoning Oni 1 was a big mistake. Now you can use React Native for UI. For React Native there is no HTML, no CSS, no bloated Web APIs, no V8. Views are NATIVE to the platforms. JavaScript is built into IR and is executed only IR (no parsing and compiling phase in app runtime), numerous UI libraries. Microsoft supports Windows and MacOS and investing into it very actively. There new JSI interface so you can call directly any native APIs, call C++. In this case UI will be very easy to implement and you can concentrate on the most difficult and time-consuming part (VS code integrations / plugins / VIM / ...) - what users are waiting for. |
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I think converting all the current patrons to lifetime licenses is a good idea, but I'm not sold on disabling Patreon altogether. It's definitely worth making an announcement on there, but if you're still motivated to work on Onivim 2 I think your patrons will be happy to continue supporting you. I don't see how the extra cash could be demotivating 😉 I'm with @likern regarding open-sourcing. The code is already out, just not freely licensed - people can already compile it themselves, and MIT would certainly make any funding... more difficult in the future. There's room for commercial products in this space, for sure. Wrt maximizing value of current supporters, my vote is on opening up downloads. Onivim 2 was definitely ambitious, so I can totally see why investors would be hesitant. This has got to be one of the largest Reason projects, and you, Zach and Ryan basically maintain the entire stack yourselves (minus the Reason toolchain and hardcore rendering stuff). Even if this can't be a full time or even part time thing for you, it's so worth reflecting on just how much this project accomplished. Congratulations on the new job, hopefully you've got a little less financial pressure on you now! 😄 |
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@bryphe I applaud you for being transparent. As the others, I wish you best of luck with your new job. |
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@bryphe I mam anyway in awe of you putting in an astonishing amount of work chasing this dream. You have done a fantastic job and please don’t be down about not being able to keep it funded; you can’t force these things and don’t owe anyone. Best of luck and happiness in your new job!! |
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Hey @jerabaul29 -- @CrossR and I already have ability to merge PRs and "administrate" the repo. I think I personally have held off from doing that because I don't want to violate @bryphe's code quality standards, but that would certainly be an option in the future! |
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Aaah, I did not know. Ok! :) . |
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Should this be closed / pinned / else? |
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This will come across as harsher than intended due to being online, written, etc., but I'm disappointed in the direction this project took. At the beginning, it seemed like this project was intended to be more vim-like than it is now. Now, it seems like this is just a VSCode clone, which is fine for the VSCode fanboys, but for those of us that can't stand VSCode it's a bit of a disappointment. It is for me, at least; I can't speak for others. Thanks for trying, thanks for the update, and congrats on the new job. Good luck! |
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@bryphe well damn. leave the patreon up imo. I'd love to see you able to continue working on the project. I've been eagerly waiting for this to become my daily driver. |
JetBrains was not VC-funded, either. Their editors are also not focused exclusively on modal editing (devs who prefer Vim are a niche). Nobody with any common sense should ever have expected OniVim 2 to be a commercial success. I was excited for it, but I'm aware that my tastes are a bit more elite than the mainstream (e.g., I also type on a 40% Planck keyboard that I put together myself, I bought an iMac just because I wanted a high-resolution glass screen rather than hazy "anti-reflective" coating, and so on). If the license fees were truly meant to support full-time development, one-time licenses should have been in the ~$200-$500 range, just like other niche professional software (e.g., DAWs like Pro Tools or Cubase, video editors like Final Cut Pro, etc.). I would have supported that price range if it meant that the full set of planned features made a stable release. |
It's the other way around. Isn't popular not because of
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It's a little disheartening to read that someone actually believes that. Like it or not, there's not necessarily any overlap between "great product" and "commercial success".
You're missing a crucial datapoint: Of how many VS Code installations? In StackOverflow's 2021 Developer Survey, approximately 71% of all of those who responded used VS Code. If you assume that this is even remotely representative of the worldwide developer community as a whole, then ~3 million installations of a Vim plugin for VS Code is a very low proportion of developers. By contrast, the VS Code Python extension has 42 million users at the time of this writing. Furthermore, it's not really immediately clear what "installs" means in this context. Is it a simple ticker of the number of times someone has simply tried something out (regardless of whether they uninstalled it)? If so, then it's a totally meaningless metric for this conversation; It would prove only that those people are at least curious about Vim. At my current startup, we have 15 developers. One of them uses Vim proper, and one of them (me) uses IntelliJ with the Vim extension. No other developer in the company is interested in modal editing. We stand at 13.3%. I would say we're overrrepresented. If you have any experience pair-programming with other developers in the software industry, you should know that the vast majority are not interested in Vim or any other form of modal editing. That's just how it is. It's a niche, plain and simple. The market for Onivim is delineated pretty cleanly; Either it's The One IDE You've Been Waiting For, or you don't care about it whatsoever. It should've been priced at a premium to reflect this. |
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@cuylerstuwe That's more than enough to be successfull. |
Again, two major mistaken assumptions:
You're making assumptions all over the place, as you're reading the world as you'd like to see it into the data. By contrast, I'm describing the reasons for the outcomes we can currently see in the present day. |
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@cuylerstuwe you're picking and choosing your data to match your preconceptions. the requirements to be successful here are a large enough userbase that is willing to pay a subscription fee to keep the developers going, you only need around 3400 users at $5 a month to achieve a 200k USD income. the numbers don't need to be huge and they almost certainly exist within the population. there are plenty of reasons why any given attempt doesn't succeed, but your assertion that the population doesn't exist isn't backed up by anything being discussed here. |
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@cuylerstuwe I don't make any mistaken assumptions, I give estimations. The potential userbase up to 13 millions users (+XCode users who uses vim plugins or shortcuts). The conversion to real users is unknown. And how you judge it can't be successful? The way you are reasoning every fail can be described as unavoidable and "objective". That's totally not true. User base of potential users is huge. Far more than for many startups who get funding. Users willing to pay too (estimation). Even if 3millions installations will convert to 300 000 (1:10 ratio) develops - that's huge. Considering that they well paid in all countries. |
That's a lot of users. With niche products like this, It's generally harder to acquire a user than to convince a die-hard user that it's worth paying more for a product.
No, this is not even close to correct. You're calculating dramatically-oversimplified gross billing rather than "income". You need to subtract payment transaction fees and other business expenses before you start considering individual "income". Stripe's transaction fees alone would take the gross down from from 204k to 185k. After even minimal other expenses are considered (e.g., hosting/bandwidth for downloads, etc.) you're likely to be down to 150k or lower. And whatever is left over would need to be divided up futher to anyone working on the project. There wouldn't be enough funding within this budget to justify e.g., two highly-skilled developers and just one marketing/copy/support guy. Your estimates are wildly optimistic.
And yet reality suggests that real VCs disagree with you, and agree with me. Again: I'm simply explaining reality. It's on my side. It's dumb to pretend that reality is a specific way just because you'd like it to be. I would prefer a world where this product is a wildly-popular well-supported commercial success, but I'm realistic enough to accept that isn't the case. Anyone who expected that this would be a successful commercial project had very childishly-naive expectations. The only way it could have possibly been built to completion would've been as a labor of love (e.g., like Vim itself). |
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You customize reality for yourself using happened fact as basis. The only reality is that project, unfortunately, unsuccessful. And I know why, at least have my own interpretation. All your other explanation of reality are just assumptions not backed up by anything. First, it's not the niche product. It's just current state of affairs. Before was the other state, when vim was highly popular and had significant market share. There's nothing inherently impossible in this project. Developers very actively use shortcuts, many, if not most, use bling typing. They are "not interested" only because they had to choose between modal text editor and fully functional IDE. The choice is obvious. IDE didn't have modal by real and again obvious reasons - resources, they implemented far more important features. Modal adds additional layer of complexity. Modal is so "unneeded" that XCode 13 added Vim mode https://developer.apple.com/xcode? Hmm... Project was unsuccessful not because it didn't have users willing to pay. It just was too ambitious - not only developing full-blown IDE, but using esoteric language and it's own UI framework. Trying to support everything. Many many reasons, obviously not "no users willing to pay". You again had choice to use full-blown IDE like VS Code or modal IDE which barely working - it's absolutely not suitable for everyday working and lacks a lot of essential features. So by that reasons not many early adopters to pay are willing to pay. Because who paid mostly knew they invest, it's not a product. Instead of concentrating on performance it would be better to just directly fork VS code and add modal layer on top of it. So we could get direct benefits. Later update fork additing performance. Also you do not consider how markets are created. Modal editing could easily create new market as it already did. But now on top of IDE, without sacrifices. |
Those same update notes put "Vim mode" on the same level of importance as "CarPlay support". If anything, the fact that it took 13 major versions of the only native Apple IDE before they considered adding (limited) support should be your sign that it's a niche request. 😉 Those of us who use Vim are elite in some sense, and the elite are not a great market unless you can charge an elite price. |
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I'm gonna lock this for now until @bryphe decides if he wants to give more context. |
Thank you for your awesome project 👍🏻
Unfortunately, lately, I've noticed significant slowdown of development.
14 days without commits and many commits in last months are just minor changes. No blog updates or new versions.
Looks like you've lost interest to project or there is financial issues.
Could you clarify what is happening with project, what's it's status and describe it's future?
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