alt Hacker NewsRealistically, there are a much larger set of things that I don't mind forking these days. It is quite a bit of effort to get to a set of things that mostly don't have bugs, but in the past I might fork a few things[0] but these days, I vendor everything, and some things I just look at the feature list and have Claude rebuild it for me. So I totally understand why actual project maintainers and authors wouldn't want input. I, as a user, am not super eager to buy in to the actual maintainers' future work. It would be super surprising that they want to buy into strangers' work.
0: I liked BurntSushi's Rust projects since they are super easy to edit because they're well architected and fast by default. Easy to write in.
I'm currently running on a fork of Helix text editor, which I heavily gutted to replace the block cursor with a beam-style (like one in insert mode, but just all the time). Since the maintainers are drowning in PRs (472 open ATM), I understandably don't expect them to have time for my weird ideas. Then I pile on top whatever PRs I want that I find useful out of these 472, and with a little bit of LLM help I have a very different text editor than the upstream.