You'll be helping Ionide's maintainers is to create modern, innovative, rich editor tooling accessible to everyone, no matter what operating system they are using. Ionide, one of the highest rated plugins in Visual Studio Code marketplace, is the long-standing, mature project with more than 1 million downloads. Ionide brings rich editor experience, known from Visual Studio, to VS Code transforming it into fully-fledged F# IDE. It's used by enthusiasts and professional developers alike, helping everyone to as productive as possible every day.

F♯ Tooling Ecosystem

Ionide doesn't exist in the vacuum - its existence is possible thanks to fantastic F# ecosystem, multiple libraries and tools that are created by the F# community. While working on making Ionide better, we contribute to and collaborate with tools and libraries that are used by other parts of the ecosystem - not only by Ionide. And we hope that collected funds will enable us to work even more on all those crucial parts of the F# tooling landscape to make it better for everyone. The projects we maintain or contribute to includes:

• FsAutoComplete - F# language server powering F# editor experience in Ionide, Vim and Emacs
• FSharp.Compiler.Service - a custom build of the F# compiler that exposes additional functionality for implementing F# language bindings, additional tools based on the compiler or refactoring tools
• Forge - a command line tool that provides tasks for creating and modification F# projects
• FSharpLint - a style checking tool for F#
• dotnet-proj-info - a tool for parsing MsBuild project files.

Our goals

Our initial goal is $x,000/month. This will ensure that work on Ionide its dependencies is sustainable for core maintainers. And that we can sleep a bit better in the night, not worrying that the project will suddenly disappear. Our specific goals include:

• One maintainer - part-time - Helping users, investigating bugs, working on new features are all time-consuming tasks. Moving to part-time employment will enable us to spend more time working on the Ionide, building new features, and will make sure that life/work balance of the maintainers is improved.

• Providing better support - Answering issues and questions as soon as possible is critical for the tooling project. In the end, if it doesn't work you may be unable to work at all.

• Working on the documentation - We realize that Ionide's documentation (or lack of it) is the biggest weakness of the project at the moment.

Our stretch goal is $x0,000/month. This will enable us to work full-time on the Ionide to create best-in-the-class editor tooling for a functional programming language. At this point we would like to transform the brand of the Ionide from the single plugin to the organization taking care of F# tooling ecosystem development, helping multiple projects to make F# tooling as good as possible.

The stretch goal would be amazing to hit, but simply being totally supported by the generosity of others makes us endlessly grateful, no matter what else happens.