That's untrue. I've created https://monokai.pro, to my knowledge the first commercial theme. It's been going strong for years now.

People are willing to pay for nice things. Especially if it takes longer to create it yourself.

A theme is more than a list of colors. Monokai Pro contains custom designed icons and color filters too, and some code logic to sync it all up. It needs continued updates, as editors keep evolving with new UX/UI elements.

I paid happily for monokai pro vscode since it was a one time payment. However I will not purchase a subscription for jetbrains intellij because per year it'll cost me the same amount as the intellij idea ultimate and that just doesn't seem like a fair price.

You get a perpetual licence after one year of payments.

Happy Monokai customer here! I want to make themes using my own palette but nothing supports OKLCH and I don't wanna convert to HEX.

I haven't noticed any difference after tailwind started using oklch, doubt there's any.

The question isn't whether you noticed a difference, but whether your aunt notices a difference on her 7 year old Chromebook

oklch should be an incredibly minor to unmeasurable performance hit, even on a 7 year old chromebook. Nor should it affect the displayed output. It's just a better color picker syntax.

7 year old chromebooks don't support olkch.

Not true, Chromebooks receive 8-10 years of updates. Meaning a 7 year old Chromebook runs the latest Chrome with oklch.

I meant making themes for apps like Sublime Text, Zed, &c.

I love spectrum been using it for maybe 7 years now

People pay for mere color schemes. https://draculatheme.com/

I paid for Dracula back when I could stare at dark mode for hours. Now I use Monokai Pro Light (paid for this too).

Free themes are a dime a dozen.

Paid themes means someone's incentivized to keep working on it and adding icons, &c.

No, paid themes are just passive income for their creators, since they get free advertising from IDE marketplaces and it costs them nothing to run. You can google free vscode theme and get hundreds of literally the same thing.

> and it costs them nothing to run

Assuming that the editor never removes/adds/changes anything then yeah, it's basically free. But since most editors are somewhat of a moving target, it does take a bit of maintenance to make sure everything continues to look right as things update.

The worst part with maintaining a theme/colorscheme is that you can't really rely on automated testing to catch most of the issues, unless you start doing snapshot testing comparing PNGs or similar, and is the biggest time-sink when a new editor version been released.

Over $390k in sales! https://draculatheme.com/open

That seems like a special case since you’re buying into a consistent theme across different apps. If it was just vscode that would be a tough sell.

he's even selling a book lmao

And shirts, hoodies, hats, etc. Wild. :D

I am more curious as to why one would buy the theme and related merch.

People used to pay for ringtones. People pay for all sorts of things that might seem weird to you because people have different tastes.

Heck, iPhone users AFAIK still can't just put their own .wav as a ringtone and need to pay Apple to use songs/sounds as ringtone.

No you don't. You've always been able to take an M4A file (MP4 AAC), rename the extension to be M4R and copy it to your iTunes library.

You can even prepare ringtones on your phone with the iOS version of GarageBand.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/120692

I don’t remmener the exact steps, but it was fairly easy. You just need a mac (which you can borrow) and an audio editor. But that’s been a few years as I’ve been using the same one for a while now.

> You just need a mac (which you can borrow)

Yeah, so only-iPhone users are out of luck since the majority of people don't have a Mac. Last time I used Android you needed the file and the phone itself, you select the audio file and you're done.

You can do it on your phone with GarageBand. Take any audio file, clip it to the desired portion, export as ringtone.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/120692

Maybe you can use iTunes on Windows? I haven't use the latter in a long time, but IIRC, it was just adding the file and syncing it to the iPhone.

I could see the case for paying for a theme that provides its own icons and works across multiple tools and goes out of its way to support tools that I use. If anyone makes skins for Segger Ozone, I've never heard of them.

I'm comfortable working without any syntax highlighting at all. It's not that I go to the effort of turning it off, I just don't really care that it's there. I used to use Sam as my daily editor - got used to plain black text pretty quick. It's all a matter of preference.

I'd pay off the cuff money ($5) if it wasn't paywalled. "Donationware" if you will. I do this with other apps/resources/things including a nice pixel font I like using in images.

I suck at colors and want nice themes. I'm glad people better at this than me take time to make nice things.

But, I don't want to ever manage licenses for my theme. My dotfiles need to fetch it automatically or it's out.