# Submission Guidelines
Before contributing please familiarize yourself with these guidelines. 

## Criteria
To avoid the clutter trap that many other lists succumb to as they scale, only the best software is included. But "best" is relative and differs person-to-person. Here, it's mostly guaged based on five criteria. Keep in mind every "guideline" is more of a suggestion and can be skirted, thus, pay greater attention to the real-life examples I've included - they do a much better job of articulating what makes it onto this list. 

### 1. Popularity
Projects with over 5000 stars are preferred. Popularity is far from the best method, but people use specific software for a reason - probably because it's halfway decent. Again, this isn't foolproof. People can be allergic to change and there's plenty of times where a piece of software is blatantly better than an alternative but the majority use the latter because they either aren't aware or just don't care. 

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Note: Criteria [2,3,4] are closely intertwined
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### 2. A Foundation
The project should have a solid foundation:
- A solid set of contributors, not neccesarily in quality but commitment

### 3. Activity
The project must show signs of recent activity. Abandoned software will not be placed on this list - **no expections.** 

### 4. Future Proof
Going alongside the above criteria, the project must have consistent activity and evidence of a future. 

### 5. Quality
Lastly, is the software decent?

## Examples
Determing whether software belongs on this list often involves a lot of external research - all of which will be explored in these examples. 

### 1. PearCleaner
Description - A free, source-available and fair-code licensed mac app cleaner 

Stars - 4.2k

Contributors - 7

On the surface PearCleaner woudn't fit with a relatively small amount of stars and just seven contributors. But research brings about the following conclusion: PearCleaner is one of two major app cleaners for MacOS - the other being the proprietary AppCleaner. Despite just 7 contributors, they have been continuously pushing updates on a ~two week interval. They have a solid roadmap for future updates and been delivering on those promises. 

Result: YES

## 2. Marktext
Description - 📝A simple and elegant markdown editor, available for Linux, macOS and Windows.

Stars - 48.1k

Contributors - 144

Every part of this project passes the test... except for the fact that it's abandoned. It's still insanely popular but hasn't had a commit in 7 months and the last release was two years ago. 

Result: NO

## 3. Zed Editor
Description -  Code at the speed of thought – Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter. 

Stars - 52.3k

Contributors - 753

Just about any software on this scale will make it onto this list. Zed Editor has a massive user base, a massive team, a solid roadmap, and the means to execute on those promises well into the future. 

Result: YES