Sarcasm: just switch to bash and know what's running on every prompt. Sure, if you need to get git status on a slow disk then anything will be slow.
I have not read the article, BTW.
Could somebody please explain how people are ready to invest their own time into development of such projects? I mean it's so risky and at the same time one still has to pay the bills.
I can't answer for the File Pilot author but I've spent many years on writing a file manager.
* It's fun to write and to use. It's like craftmanship.
* Hopefully some companies/people will realize how many hours they waste using the default OS file manager
* It's less risky than developing a game full time (I think)
* Sure, I lost a lot of money to not having a normal job but my bills are low and my priority is more happiness
I've come to realize (mainly by reading comments on this very forum) that, for an increasing amount of people, programming is just a job and they don't see it as an art form or a hobby. They genuinely cannot fathom that someone would spend time on ANY project without being paid.
It's very sad but ultimately society couldn't function of we only hired passion-driven programmers, so eh.
I'd like to believe any developer has more than a few pet projects around which they dedicate their time into whenever one has free time. Some get forgotten, others are overly specific to be marketed at all but maybe that one in a hundred has the opportunity to become a good investment, so it is just matter of buckling up and trying to ship it to the world. This doesn't mean it's going to make you financially successful, but actually delivering products does give you the experience of knowing what makes a successful one if anything at all. If you are lucky, you may break even in terms of time/resources spent after all the ordeal and you also get experience, though I wouldn't say that's the experience of most for the first few times, there's always a point in trying.
