Kickstarter?

**Topic**
Lord Omicron paid me a visit recently and as I lay in bed feverishly tossing and turning it occurred to me that it might be worth doing a kickstarter for a year of fulltime lazygit development.

**Your thoughts**

Lazygit constitutes a second job for me and that means large chunks of my 'free' time (afternoons, weekends, holidays) is spent on lazygit. Of course, working on lazygit is much more satisfying and meaningful than working at my day job (by an order of magnitude), but juggling the two has been a constant source of burnout over the years, and when it gets too much, I have to give priority to the job that pays the bills, meaning lazygit (i.e. features, issues, contributors) gets neglected. And paradoxically, although lazygit has no deadlines, I often feel rushed because I'm racing against the clock to make the best use of my limited windows of time, which leads to lower quality output.

BUT if lazygit _was_ the day job that would all change: I'd be able to give features/bugs the attention they deserve and I'd have a better work life balance meaning less burnout and more consistent improvements. I'd also be able to dedicate more time to the community of contributors (shout out in particular to @Ryooooooga and @mark2185 who are currently smashing out great features) and making it easier for a new contributor to jump straight into a PR.

Some features/improvements that I'd like to see and which I think (perhaps optimistically) are achievable in a year:
* more efficient loading of commits
* better searching of commits
* bulk actions on files/commits
* navigating the repo's file tree both in the working tree and in an old commit
* better github integration (and potentially gitlab, bitbucket, etc)
* git blame
* proper support for bare repos
* better coverage of the git API (bespoke CLI arguments for example)
* better documentation for both users and contributors
* lots of bug fixes
* other that don't come to mind right now

To be clear, all the donations so far have kept me going motivationally and I owe a debt of gratitude to everybody who's helped and who continues to help even now! But going fulltime requires a different scale.

Notably, Magit [ran a kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-the-magical-git-client) successfully a couple of years ago so at the very least there is a precedent in this niche space of terminal git UIs.

I'm never going to stop working on lazygit, so even if a kickstarter fails, lazygit will continue slowly improving, but lazygit has the potential to become the de-facto standard terminal UI (perhaps UI period) for git and a kickstarter would help realise that potential.

So my questions are:
* is a kickstarter a good idea?
* are there alternative solutions?
* if a kickstarter is a good idea, how the hell do we pull it off?