We got monthly subscriptions for editor color schemes now??

It kind of boggles my mind too. Imagine all these new subscriptions possibilities today, and we're still driving around with a free google maps.

Aside, imagine if they decided to charge for Google Maps today, the shear loss of income for every physical location would be incredible.

They are charging for Google Maps today. You have to pay for your store to stand out.

I mean sure, every ad-driven service is paid for by someone.

I can see why it may make sense for JetBrains. JetBrains IDEs have extensive support for theming every type of element, and the IDEs are also continually evolving. The actual situation for many JetBrains color schemes (albeit free) are that that you may run into situations where something is not properly styled. I thought of redoing a Nord color scheme for a fun hour-long up to weekend thing and just didn't bother when I learned more about it.

That’s the issue with these “semantic” color schemes, high complexity with (maybe subjectively) low value. Look at this.name(), is it a variable, a property, a method, a bird, a plane? Who could tell without that lighten(resaturate(green, -20%), 17%) hint hardcoded as a fixed value?

Decent coloring systems use a few colors to structure the code/data/ui and that’s it. Nobody needs these hundreds of accents, it’s just a component of upselling.

The website is really well made, I like the theme and I think I use the normal version on VS Code.

A Color Theme subscription, this feels like a joke to me. I can get custom fonts and styles, but colors … and not even a new theme but a „remastered“ version …

Edit: Nope, using Dracula

Saving some clicks:

$10/yr for the first year, $8 for the second, $6 for the third year and onwards uninterrupted.

$1/$0.80/$0.60 per month for the first/second/third year uninterrupted.

I paid for the VS Code theme. I will be passing on this.

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/26007-monokai-pro/prici...

Monokai Pro is now available for JetBrains IDEs. A well-designed theme with carefully tuned colors and custom icons, built to let you focus on your code. Worth checking out if you're particular about your editor's aesthetics.

Thanks, I didn't know someone was to be credited for what is probably, the most common theme around.

I've ran many IDEs and text editors, I don't think any of them doesn't have a monokai named theme, exact match or not.

That said I find it difficult to derive a wage from a theme this popular and this widespread already. Or even for a theme alone. That said, I'm sure you'll find some customers.

I couldn't find at first glance what "pro" features were worth my hard earned money? Was it because the IDE shell itself would follow the theme?

The original Monokai was created in 2006, and I created Monokai Pro in 2017 to be more balanced, include a custom icon set and color filters. Here's more information about the history of Monokai: https://monokai.pro/history

Thanks! That takes me back, I was using monokai with Textmate back then!

The neat part about this project is that someone is choosing to see if they can make a subscription model for an attractive style viable.

The market, of course, and not the initially and loud naysayers will decide. So many things that we never thought would take off eventually did.

When you create a product, there are many different sorts of ways to make income:

  * just give it away (no income)
  * donations (I hear this has low income rates)
  * one time fee (usually relatively high price and cost-of-entry for the buyer)
  * subscription (lower cost of entry for the buyer, recurring income, easy-to-forget, facilitating continued revenue stream)
  * free + money-making-gimmick / loot boxes / season pass / pay-per-key / horse armor (free cost of entry for the buyer, gamble for the developer, potentially source of HUGE returns, see: Fortnite, League of Legends, and so on)

The subscription model for styling tools has been seen in some places, usually customer-facing ones (see: https://mui.com/pricing/ ); but I don't think I've seen it very many times for developer-facing tools.

Should be interesting to see the results. Will you be sharing those in the coming future, maybe, to see how this experiment goes?

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.

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?

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.

I happily paid for the Sublime version of this theme but I have negative interest in a forever subscription for this.

I just downloaded this and its very polished for a new release. Works great!

I will trial it for a bit and if I like it will definitely subscribe. Have you considered adding some premium features to help justify the subscription?

Thanks! I thought about unlocking color filters for subscribers, but opted for making everything available for free, and just showing a popup asking for a license every now and then.

I'd suggest you follow Jetbrains' pricing structure.

What do you mean exactly? At the moment I'm tapping into their marketplace functionality with a small subscription fee and discounts the longer you use it.

You're literally selling a theme. A common one at that. No sale.

The common theme was created by me. I've tried my best to make a polished theme for Jetbrains so that all colors in the IDE and the syntax highlighting harmonize better.

Coming next, a monthly subscription to enable darkmode...

You get regular dark mode for free, but if you want the "none more black" Spinal Tap version, you'll have to shell out.

„You have exceeded your monthly git commits. Every additional commit will cost 0,20$“

You have to buy another commit cartridge.

But we don’t sell commits anymore, you have to buy the pull, push and commit bundle.

Genius idea. There must be one of these gui git clients that work like that.

Tbh monokai (and solarized) never appealed to me, personally I dislike both. The best colorscheme is the one you make yourself. It’s not that hard once in a lifetime after you settled with an editor and 80% of it is the background and the primary keywords color. Red on dark is unreadable to me. Instead of code structure, I see white identifiers everywhere.

Please, stop this cheap marketing

I think this should be a Show HN?

Absolutely not.

The website doesn't say anything other than it's a plugin for JetBrains IDEs.

Sure, but what does it do? The website doesn't say at all, only including some screenshots of it in action.

WTF?

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The comments here clear that up, saying it's just a theme. That should be clearly communicated from the website itself though. ;)

> My feelings about this very much hinge on whether or not it is in fact the original creator of the theme who gets paid for it. If so? Fair enough, a very small ask for a very useful thing. If not? Fuck your own face.

OPs HN profile says: "Author of the original Monokai color scheme and its successor https://monokai.pro"

So i guess, not his face to be f*@%#!

Sometimes it's worth to invest minimal effort into "research" before commenting aggressively.

I was making fun of Elon Musk, the “fuck your own face” thing is making the rounds in the group chats.

Hey, that's alright. We all sometimes make jokes that aren't as funny as we imagined.

There you go. Now you’re doing much better being funny.

Hope this is using Pantone copyrighted colors, because otherwise a yearly subscription with no perpetual fallback license is rather ridiculous for a theme. /s

Is there a copyright for colors???

Trademark, usually; but Pantone is a whole verification system, I think?