Some of them are definitely more "historic" than others.
For instance, #2 (<table>-based layouts) definitely shaped much of early-to-mid-2000s web design, and can be viewed as a precursor to flexbox/other modern layout engines.
Same with sIFR -- custom webfonts are totally taken for granted today largely because of "hacks" like this.
I strongly agree with table layouts being historic. A large reason we now have flexbox is because early CSS was really bad at replicating table-based layouts, so people didn't stop using then despite the drawbacks.
Same story with rounded corners, which were originally accomplished with tables and images. And a lot of the conventions for website navigation were established in table-based layouts
I don’t know about others, but I hated sIFR. It was routinely deployed without sane fallback (so that if you didn’t have Flash, headings were broken, for example—it being common to deploy it on headings only, since it was overall so awful), it butchered performance, the rendering was ugly and often difficult to read, and it thwarted regular operations like text selection.
“Discipline” is one of those albums that totally changed the way I thought about music.
When I was a kid I was really into classic prog rock (i.e. Yes, Genesis, ELP, etc.) and was mesmerized by Bill Bruford’s playing and technique on “Close to the Edge”, which led me to this incarnation of King Crimson.
One song in particular that really stuck out to me was “Thela Hun Ginjeet”, which includes a recording of Adrian Belew recounting an experience being heckled on the street, but until I read the Wikipedia page for the album I had no idea it was secretly recorded by Fripp and wasn’t scripted (including the maniacal laugh at the end). It blew my mind that they were able to create this soundscape that turned a recording of a totally sane Belew into what I thought was a paranoid schizophrenic.
Each song on the album stands on its own, and it’s probably my favorite in King Crimson’s discography.
I wrote a reddit post[0] about why Oni takes so much space to build, but the TLDR is that we build a bunch of native libraries from scratch on a fresh build, namely Skia.
I would like to note that we don’t maintain/support/promote the Oni package on AUR. Builds from scratch are mostly for “trial” or contribution purposes. We do try to help with build issues in the Discord, though!
I would also disagree with the idea that a light and fast program must be easy/quick to build. C++ is notorious for having huge resource/time requirements to compile, but the end result (assuming good code) can be faster than some C code! Consequently, it takes relatively little time to spin up a node interpreter but the resulting program is orders of magnitude slower.
Oni is written in OCaml, so naturally it requires the OCaml compiler to build. Those NPM packages aren’t JS — we just leverage the existing NPM ecosystem for our native code.
We do recognize that building from scratch is not ideal, which is why we provide prebuilt binaries for purchase. I can’t give an exact timeline, but we’ve discussed publishing public trial builds probably before the end of the year, which further reduces the need to build from scratch.
Feel free to ask any other questions in the Discord!
Yeah the UI is completely custom built using Revery (a custom-built Electron alternative). Similarities to VSCode are just a result of it being the main inspiration. I would say Sublime also has a large influence on our design, i.e. in the minimap
I think Oni is in a hard place where it’s the primary source of income for Outrun Labs. Oni is open source in two senses
- the source is available online (technically doesn’t meet some definitions of open source, but the source is open)
- we MIT commits after 18 months.
In terms of contributors retaining rights to the product, we do have a bug bounty program where if you fix a bug with a PR, you get a license for free. Not quite what you mean I’m sure, but it’s essentially payment for contributions.
We definitely aren’t deliberately trying to undermine the OSD. The reality of open source software at the moment is that most of it is either created or sponsored by large companies who have a ton of money to throw at it. We are trying a new model of making money from open source software to allow us (well, Bryan) to work on Oni full time. We’re definitely open to suggestions, though!
Just so I understand this correctly, the version of Onivim 2 from 18 months ago will be open source? That's not the worst solution if true. John Carmack would do something similar with many of his game engines back when he was working with Id Tech (albeit with a much longer lag time).
Unfortunately none of the main contributors are designers. I think we end up with a very VSCode-similar look because in terms of UX that’s our main inspiration. We do diverge in some areas, though.
Debug functionality is on our radar and it will hopefully be in relatively soon!
I’ve actually been working on adding more support for native widgets in Revery, mostly focusing on macOS since thats my daily OS, but Windows too. You can now use native buttons and menus, and I’m looking into adding other native inputs (like text fields).
I assume by FOMO you mean the increased license price as time goes on, but as far as I understand (that decision was made before me), the idea is that the product becomes more valuable over time as a result of more features being added. You can still buy a one time license as of right now.
As far as abandonment is concerned, I can let you know that hasn’t been discussed. Bryan recently went on his first vacation since working on Oni, but work has resumed since he returned.
Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions — the Discord is always open!
I don't see the issue. Price of a company's stock goes up as the company continues to become more useful over time and no one thinks this is unreasonable. Why not same for a product?
And is the same model used by many 'early access' titles, pay less up front for the incomplete game to fund the completion of the future full-price game.
Interestingly, I've seen some devs turn the concept on its head and charge more up front, kind of to say "only buy in now if you are really doing this to support development, and in return you'll get an early release build - but you aren't buying the game early."
How can we get a one time license? I tried it when it was still the oni repo 2 years ago and would be keen to try again. And is there a summary of how it was different from oni (1?)
For instance, #2 (<table>-based layouts) definitely shaped much of early-to-mid-2000s web design, and can be viewed as a precursor to flexbox/other modern layout engines.
Same with sIFR -- custom webfonts are totally taken for granted today largely because of "hacks" like this.