I wanted the freedom to completely reimplement things and drop ideas that didn't work out in intercooler
I also wanted to stress that htmx isn't just another javascript library, competing with react and the rest. It is focused on HTML and extending HTML to make it a powerful and complete hypertext. I think that the name htmx captures that idea pretty well.
The fact that intercooler didn't have an extension mechanism meant I had to heap a lot of stuff into the core (e.g. ic-action) that was interesting and useful, but made the code base messy and unfocused.
htmx has an extension mechanism, so you can pull in stuff like this (or write your own extension):
I was a fan of intercooler and used it in production more than once but for some reason I could never get my head round the dependency functionality and ended up just ignoring it.
Intercooler works beautifully alongside Django and Django Rest Framework and I look forward to trying out htmx.
I also wanted to stress that htmx isn't just another javascript library, competing with react and the rest. It is focused on HTML and extending HTML to make it a powerful and complete hypertext. I think that the name htmx captures that idea pretty well.