Certainly, no contributors get into projects with the sole purpose to get a financial gain out of them. Open source has never been about money either. But for you as an author, the lack of funds to sustain your ideas and pay for even a small portion of the time you’re spending on them is—I’m not going to lie—devastating. It may not be your concern at first but it will inevitably become one when your ideas gain popularity, demanding significantly more time than there are hours in a day.

Last year I read the excellent article “Hands-Free Coding” by Josh Comeau which went into detail about modifying his programming workflow to use dictation and eye-tracking after developing Cubital Tunnel Syndrome. I highly recommend reading the whole article and watching the demonstration videos of his approach. This article was my first exposure to the dictation software Talon, which is specifically built to be hackable and naturally targets software developers. If you know anything about me by now, it’s that I can’t use a computer without a tiling window manager anymore.

For the last few years I have been writing and maintaining a tiling window manager for Windows that has steadily grown in usage and popularity. My first exposure to tiling window managers was on macOS with kwm (which was succeeded by chunkwm and later yabai). Naturally, this meant that whenever I used Linux, I would reach for bspwm. I am a big proponent of what I call the “bspwm architecture” for tiling window managers.

I have previously written about how I unwittingly found myself at the center of an accidental community with a shared desire for a stable, reliable tiling windows manager for Windows. Despite the huge growth of komorebi users, I remain for all intents and purposes the sole developer of the codebase. Several of the most important aspects of komorebi today however are in large part thanks to community contributions. In no particular order:

It was during the shutdowns of 2020 that I became increasingly frustrated with my Intel MacBook pro. It was slow, loud and hot; all the things that many people, myself included, dislike about laptops. I decided to build a PC. After a month or so spent scouring the internet for parts, I had assembled a PC. I ran Pop!_OS for a while, but this being my first desktop machine in over a decade, I spent a fair about of time dual booting into Windows to play all the video games that I missed out on as a macOS user.