Tabularis Joins the JetBrains Open Source Program
There's a small loop closing here that we find genuinely funny: several of the people who write Tabularis do it inside a JetBrains IDE, and now JetBrains is backing the project on the other side of that screen. We've been accepted into the JetBrains Open Source Support program, which comes with a free annual All Products Pack for the maintainers — every IDE they make, one license.
IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, PyCharm, GoLand, RustRover. Chances are you've had one of these open recently too. Unlike some of the sponsors we've written about here, this isn't a product we discovered because of the deal. We already had it installed.
That's really the whole story, and it's a short one, so we'll spend the rest of this post on the part that's more interesting than the announcement itself.
When the tool sponsors the tool
DigitalOcean's credits went into infrastructure nobody using Tabularis will ever see. Vercel's program upgraded the pipeline behind this very website. Both are real and useful and mostly invisible. This one is different in a way that's hard to put a dollar figure on: it's not infrastructure, it's craft. Faster indexing on a codebase that's grown past what "small project" used to mean. Refactors that don't require holding the whole call graph in your head. A debugger that doesn't fight you. None of that ships a feature by itself, but all of it is the difference between an evening of focused work and an evening of fighting the tool instead of the problem.
We build Tabularis because we think working with data shouldn't be this painful. Turns out the editor felt the same way about us.
The terms, for anyone curious how these programs actually work: stay open source, stay maintained, put a small credit somewhere visible. No equity, no roadmap say, nothing that changes what we ship or when. Just one more expense a nights-and-weekends project doesn't have to carry anymore.
Finding Tabularis useful? Star it on GitHub — it takes a second and helps more developers discover the project. Star on GitHubThe part we say every time because it's still true
To the JetBrains Open Source team specifically, for turning an email exchange into licenses with zero friction, thank you.
And to everyone who's starred the repo, opened a plugin, filed a bug, or translated a string: a four-month-old project doesn't get picked up by the tools it's built with unless it looks like it's going somewhere. That impression is entirely yours. We just write the code — increasingly, apparently, on someone else's dime.
The Tabularis Team