Comment by albertzeyer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by albertzeyer | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it really still make sense to develop an editor as a commercial product. This is probably a massive effort, and the revenue is maybe not so large.

There is IntelliJ and Visual Studio. IntelliJ is successful, yes, but they have a long history, and the editor is really good. Visual Studio is maybe also successful but I'm not sure how profitable it really was or is.

But otherwise? Sublime Text and others were maybe successful at some point but not sure how profitable they really were. If you count the amount of development which went into it vs the revenue.

For me as a user, I'm extremely hesitant to use any non-open source editor. An editor is a long-term investment. I would not touch this Zas editor unless maybe in 5 to 10 years when it is widely used by many people or when it has become open source but otherwise not. Yes, it looks nice from a first glance but that is by far not enough.

My personal only exception is IntelliJ because it is so good. PyCharm specifically, although I have used other IntelliJ products in the past, starting with the original Java editor, 15 years ago or so, which was heavily praised by some friends.

But otherwise, I want to be able to extend the editor easily, also its core itself. I want to be able to support it when the original developer stopped working on it. Or port it to other systems the developer does not care about. Or do some changes the developer disagrees with. Etc. I want to be sure that it is in principle possible to run this in the next 10-20 years. Or not only me. The nice thing with open source is that many people think likewise, and then there will also be others doing such effort, like supporting it on recent systems, adding features, fixing bugs, etc. So then it is a community effort.

Yeah, people in this thread are praising the one time purchase but I'm almost seeing it as a red flag - how do we know a niche product like this will stick around without recurring revenue? I don't know if that's paid major upgrades or similar.

Edit: As a sibling comment pointed out it does actually do paid upgrades after a year so ignore my comment.

The Affinity Suite does the same and they're still around, even though there's massive competition in Adobe CS competitors.

Yeah good point, but I wonder if their products have a larger market and the price point is about double what this is going for. I also noticed they have an add-ons store, not sure if they take a cut there too?

Those are very different cases.

The adobe suite is bloated, slow, overly complex... There is a very strong niche for a suite or single tools that have better design, performance, integration and UX.

Jetbrains dev tools are highly praised just on their own and they have a strong plugin ecosystem (see: Cursive for Clojure).

Also these kind of developer tools have to indirectly compete with highly extensible and well established open source alternatives such as Vim, Emacs, VSCode who all have their unique strengths and support tons of languages.

Not the current target audience as my language of choice is not supported, but I'd also prefer a subscription.

Permanent license with one year of upgrades is - for serious users - a yearly subscription. With a price tag of $25 that sounds quite reasonable and also viable.

You're right sorry I totally missed the fine print...

bothers me that it's fine print. why do we all have to resort to dark patterns, even among coders making tools for other coders :(

By contrast, I thought it's really well presented. It is a permanent license, only the patches are stopping after a year. I was even hoping by myself they have the good sense to offer optional auto-renewal.

The larger picture is, selling software somehow is always awkward. Given that, these folks have hit a near optimum, imo. And it's better to pay for a good tool than to find a good tool only to see the vendor go out of business. And that has happened plenty of times.

> Sublime Text and others were maybe successful at some point but not sure how profitable they really were.

Still profitable enough to be larger than it's ever been, enough to fund new products like Sublime Merge and continue releasing updates. I'd argue any small business that provides a lively hood for at least one person is fairly successful.

I have a paid license for Sublime but I still feel like I’m looking for the “right” editor for me, and if I find anything that looks like it might be it I will happily pay (after a small free trial to see if, like Nova, it’s not for my use cases).

My gut tells me there are a lot of people in this situation.

[Edit: since Go is my main language and I want to learn Rust, I will definitely be giving this a try!]

I mean you are obviously conflicted but you basically already provided the conclusion: Yes, it makes sense – if it's good enough.

Most of the world's coders have probably not been born yet. Code tooling is still getting more valuable per hour spend on developing it. If IntelliJ was worth it in the past, so is potentially every tool from here on out.

Of course with web IDEs and AI coding, the whole space might still end up somewhere else entirely, requiring very different things, but alas, that's always a potential outcome.

The regular Visual Studio (Community, Pro, Enterprise) (if that is still the names used) is quite profitable.

As a regular person you can use Community for free within some limitations. (I think now that there is feature parity between Community an Pro)

If you work for a big company you need Pro or Enterprise sold as subscriptions for rather a lot of $$$. esp the Enterprise version.

The Enterprise version does have some great features that most devs. never get to use

I think parent meant 'profitable' as how much Microsoft profits from it, not if it's good value for money for consumers.

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