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by monokai_nl 530 days ago
I don't think I'll share the details in the future, but it's an experiment for sure. I've seen success by selling one-off licenses of Monokai Pro for Sublime Text and VSCode, where I used the same mechanism: everything is free to use, except you get a pop-up message every now and then. People that want to get rid of the popup or offer support can then opt to pay for a license.

I understand it's uncommon practice to ask a fee for a set of colors. The reality is that making a theme and keeping it up to date is not trivial. A color theme, custom icon graphics and IDE config, along with code to glue it all together when you switch filters does take some time to make. And the codebase is different for each editor (Sublime: Python, VSCode: JavaScript, Jetbrains: Kotlin). I think it's not unfair to ask for a small fee for this work.
1 comments
t-writescode 530 days ago
This is certainly my ignorance; but I am curious. What kinds of work are required to keep a theme up-to-date?

And, I guess it's also worth asking: would it be reasonable / possible to offer update packs / update prices for people fixing it? Or do you think there'd be even less return on that?

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monokai_nl 530 days ago
Re: keeping up-to-date: color themes depend on underlying syntax definitions. Every now and then these are updated and break the colors in subtle ways. Aslo, custom icon requests for files / languages, editors that update and provide new theme entry points to be colorized. These are the most common points to keep up to date.

Re: People fixing the theme: I don't disclose the source so that won't work I guess.

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