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Nova by Panic

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Re: Nova by Panic

#71

Post by Brendinooo »

vosper wrote: post #46

> It's new, hyper-fast, and flexible, with all the features you want: [...] a Minimap Do people actually find the Minimap useful for coding? If so, how? And why is it better/different than just a scrollbar, or searching? I've always thought of Minimaps as a thing that seems like it should be adding something to the interface, but actually isn't at all. Seems like pointless eye-candy, to me. What am I missing?

I use my minimap sometimes. Some people are just more visual.

Like, if I have a big file that has a class somewhere, and I know I took a bunch of notes on it, I can scan the minimap for the big block of green comment text, and click that section to jump directly to it.

Regardless, I'm not really short on horizontal space in a world where monitors are huge and 80-character lines are still the norm, so it costs little to keep it there.

Re: Nova by Panic

#72

Post by dylan604 »

worldmerge wrote: post #69
dylan604 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you have a spec of dust under one of the keys on your keyboard that is causing the site to think you are trying to do something?

I don't think so. I've never had any site, even ones that use complex animations like Stripe's site bring my machine to a crawl like this. I'm pretty confident it's the Canvas animation causing this. I disabled JS and the site runs fine.

Sorry, I was just making fun of the specific model laptop. I'm on a 2016 model, and my s,d,f,t, and left-cmd key caps all come off while typing. I would love to see how much it is going to cost me to have fixed, but I've had to live with it since all of the Mac Stores in my area were closed. Now, I'm just used to it even though my WPM has taken a major hit.

Re: Nova by Panic

#73

Post by spiralganglion »

I see a lot of folks here comparing this to VS Code and asking "Why would I use this instead?" — I am exactly on the opposite side of that equation. Why would I use VS Code when I can use this?

I've been using Atom for most of the decade (plus a bit of Sublime, and TextMate before), and I've loved being able to hack it to look and feel exactly how I want. There's a ton of custom CSS in my setup.

Now, Atom is slow. That is a daily frustration for me. The latency on every keypress is grating. I've stripped out every package I can, and that custom CSS I mentioned is mostly hiding things I don't want to see. But still, the lag! I feel it all around.

I tried switching to VS Code, but it was appreciably worse for me. I couldn't configure it to look as nice as Atom (and it had the unshakable feeling that it was made by folks from the Windows school of design — plenty of weird [to me] spacing and typographic choices). It also didn't feel any faster.

So why does Nova appeal to me? Well, Atom is no longer supported, so I'm going to have to switch to something anyway. Nova doesn't look as minimal as I'd like, but I can live with that — at least it looks nice! And it's a native app, so it should (in theory) be buttery smooth.

When it comes to a tool I will spend all day, every day in, $50/year is peanuts. This is my working life. It's worth spending a relatively tiny bit of money to have something nice instead of something good enough. Price is a non-issue for me.

As for extensions... I don't use any. I stripped them all out to try to make Atom faster. So now I get to discover what extensions are available, without being left longing for something I had to give up. Maybe I'll build an extension for myself. This is a new frontier for me.

So we'll see. I tried Coda, didn't like it. I love Transmit, though. So if this tool lives up to its promises, and succeeds on its own terms, I'll be thrilled. For the folks happy with VS Code... that's fantastic. I'm glad you have found a tool you like. For folks like me, for whom VS Code just felt off, this seems like a great option.

Re: Nova by Panic

#74

Post by eloisius »

SirHound wrote: post #11

I've been using the beta version of Nova for a few weeks now and I've almost used my trial period for the 1.0. As a TypeScript developer, if someone made me choose between paying $99 for the actually-free VS Code, or buy Nova, I would by VS Code without hesitation. Before it began getting long in the tooth I was a big Coda fan. On the whole I like VS Code but I do suffer the occasional runaway process so I am open-mi…

I like Panic’s products a lot, particularly Transmit, but for something I use day in and day out to write code, munge datasets to solve production incidents, build and run code, etc., I can’t imagine improving upon a terminal with vim and standard Unix utils. I’m not a total console-chauvinist, I use a GUI email client. But every time I’ve tried any IDE or graphical editor like this, no matter how customizable it is, it still falls short in comparison. At best they only begin to approach what I can do with Unix, but require tedious mouse aiming and typically introduce much greater feedback latency.

Re: Nova by Panic

#75

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Brendinooo wrote: post #2

> Here's a little editor story for fun. During beta we found some bugs in Apple's text layout engine that we just could not fix. Our solution? Writing our own text layout manager… from scratch. Not only did this fix the bugs, but it also boosted our editor's performance. We're not messing around! Seems like there's nobody better than Panic at doing this sort of thing. They're willing to push Apple's UI forward, but t…

The company itself would likely have become part of Apple if not for one bit of unlucky timing. Apple wanted to turn Panic's Mac OS 9 music player, Audion, into iTunes.

https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

Re: Nova by Panic

#76

Post by Gaelan »

yesimahuman wrote: post #41
esaym wrote: post #24

Man I'm still vim only. I've tried these giant IDE apps, but just can't wing it.

You're getting downvoted but a legitimate question is if vim binding support is coming or is even possible in the extension framework? VS Code vim binding support is very buggy and breaks frequently, but otherwise works well. I could see myself switching if vim bindings were better on this because I think the sweet spot of editors is a nice GUI/project tree/etc. with vim bindings.

> even possible in the extension framework

quickly looking at the docs, I see no support for keybinds without modifier keys or changing cursor shape, both of which are essential for decent vim emulation.

Re: Nova by Panic

#77

Post by xnz8 »

qppo wrote: post #38
asadlionpk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going for Swift means competing with XCode, which wouldn't make sense as Swift is generally used along with the entire iOS/macOS Dev tools (Simulators, UI Builders, Device Manager etc). Not a wise thing to do.

XCode was a motivating factor in my purchase of JetBrains products, specifically CLion.

New thing this year, but VSCode + with Apple's SourceKit LSP extension [1] has been working surprisingly well for me. Glad to have more alternatives to Xcode.

Have been using SPM's "swift build" + some copy commands to create a fully functional signable bundle, no need even for an .xcodeproj.

[1] https://nshipster.com/vscode/

Re: Nova by Panic

#78

Post by awill »

I'm mixed on these Mac only apps. While they do look/feel better than cross platform apps, I really, really love being able to use SublimeText on my work laptop (Mac), and my personal desktop (Linux).

Re: Nova by Panic

#79

Post by Brendinooo »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #75
Brendinooo wrote: post #2

> Here's a little editor story for fun. During beta we found some bugs in Apple's text layout engine that we just could not fix. Our solution? Writing our own text layout manager… from scratch. Not only did this fix the bugs, but it also boosted our editor's performance. We're not messing around! Seems like there's nobody better than Panic at doing this sort of thing. They're willing to push Apple's UI forward, but t…

The company itself would likely have become part of Apple if not for one bit of unlucky timing. Apple wanted to turn Panic's Mac OS 9 music player, Audion, into iTunes. https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

That's such a great story that's equally well-told. I think that story is what turned me on to Panic in general. Their blog was a must-read for me for years.

Re: Nova by Panic

#80

Post by tleb_ »

vosper wrote: post #46

> It's new, hyper-fast, and flexible, with all the features you want: [...] a Minimap Do people actually find the Minimap useful for coding? If so, how? And why is it better/different than just a scrollbar, or searching? I've always thought of Minimaps as a thing that seems like it should be adding something to the interface, but actually isn't at all. Seems like pointless eye-candy, to me. What am I missing?

I feel the same about minimaps. In the same extract they list "editor overscroll"; the feature set must be limited to list that on the landing page.

> It's new, hyper-fast, and flexible, with all the features you want: smart autocomplete, multiple cursors, a Minimap, editor overscroll, tag pairs and brackets, and way, way more.

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