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Nova by Panic

nova.app

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Re: Nova by Panic

#201

Post by hombre_fatal »

threatofrain wrote: post #3

It's strange that Nova would target web tech as their top priority, and not Swift. If you're Mac-exclusive, why not advertise top-class support for Apple ecosystem app development? Since Nova is prioritizing web workflows, VSC is the elephant in the room and a very deadly competitor. It's free and open source, it's available on Windows, MacOS, Linux, and it can also be ported to the web. And it's Insanely popular and…

Targeting web development first seems like the obvious business decision. If building an Xcode competitor is a good idea, then it's still a good idea after you have made an editor that's worth using for broader tasks and vetted by the market.

People who care already edit Swift in their favorite editor and use Xcode for the rest of the dev iOS process. You'd be better off trying to capture the hearts of people so that you're their favorite editor than specializing to implement the "rest of the iOS dev process" on day 0.

As an iOS developer, I think most people start off disliking Xcode but then settle into a reluctant but productive relationship with it. The only things I need to use it for (device simulation, interface builder) are hard to build and yet they're not the things that annoy me about Xcode. Or rather, I wouldn't rather be wrestling with them on someone else's ultimately buggy attempt at reimplementing them.

Re: Nova by Panic

#202

Post by reaperducer »

Eager to try this out. Coda was far ahead of its time, but became dated as others caught up. Hopefully Nova is just as far ahead.

Moreover, I'm getting tired of VS Code's slowness and quirks, so switching back to something from Panic would be great. If it crashes less often than VS Code, it's half way there.

For those who don't know, Panic is well known for decades for making incredibly high-quality software. It's not a big, flashy SV startup, but a small team in Portland that emphasizes quality over quantity.

Also important: Panic takes purchase orders, which is the only way the company I work for will buy software. A multi-billion dollar company where only the C-levels have credit cards. Panic bent over backwards to sell us several products.

Re: Nova by Panic

#203

Post by antaviana »

eloisius wrote: post #74
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,…

Have you tried VS Code in Remote Development mode?

Re: Nova by Panic

#204

Post by mamcx »

cosmotic wrote: post #97
mamcx wrote: post #92

(In case that somebody of panic read this) For different reasons, I use VS Code (pretty, JS stuff), Sublime (fast), IntelliJ(rust) and a SQL Tool(sql!) at the same time. I like the idea of coda of being more IDEish with transmission and ssh built-in, but one thing that no editor I have use is good at, is to see logs, sql and CVS/JSON data. In the case of CVS/json, I kill for a way to turn it in auto-datatable with bu…

IDEA has excellent log support, SQL, and CVS/JSON support including loading as a table with search.

I just checked and is true. I need to test for a while how good. Thanks!

Re: Nova by Panic

#205

Post by mooman219 »

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…

"Writing our own text layout manager… from scratch". I would be pessimistic of the magnitude of this statement.

I do a significant amount of text engine work and I'm skeptical what they implied by this. The likely case is they glued together other solutions (Like HarfBuzz/FreeType/etc) and expose their own API on top of that. This is perfectly acceptable and even encouraged for accessibility reasons. It may be that CoreText isn't acceptable for their use case.

What I think this would be misinterpreted as them writing the whole stack from scratch. For example, shaping is part of layout and it would be monumental if they wrote their own shaper given even HarfBuzz, DirectWrite, and CoreText do not have complete coverage yet. Additionally, BiDi + line breaking + shaping has bugs even in Chrome on some edge cases.

Re: Nova by Panic

#206

Post by reaperducer »

thamer wrote: post #163

Looks pretty, but is there really no Vim extension? I couldn't find one on the Extensions page. This is a deal-breaker for me, I can't use an editor or IDE without Vim bindings, this would kill my productivity. Is one planned, maybe?

I can't use an editor or IDE without Vim bindings

Maybe this part will help:

"We have easily customizable key bindings"

I don't know if they can be customized to match Vim, but it might be too soon to write Nova off.

Re: Nova by Panic

#207

Post by Aeolun »

ajkjk wrote: post #130
copperx wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost agree; but in my experience, JetBrains IDEs are worth every cent. I am more productive on them than in Visual Studio Code, even for "simple" tasks, like raw HTML/CSS/JS editing.

Weird, I can't stand them. Mine falls over on a moderately sized project and it feels like it's always melting while re-indexing-- which also totally blocks inspection operations.

In my experience, indexing takes longer, but after that the autocomplete is actually instant, as opposed to VS code’s ‘lets wait 10 seconds to show you the hint you might want to automatically import this’.

I’m flipping between Jetbrains and VS code a bit, but Jetbrains is by far the superior experience.

Re: Nova by Panic

#208

Post by johnknowles »

Anyone else tired of this underlying form for IDEs? I get why the side toolbars make sense, from a space efficiency perspective, but the amount of information to take in is always overwhelming from a zoomed-out perspective, considering the whole app window. Why do app designers continue to force us to select what to focus on amongst a sea of visual stimulation? Make it hidden by default, and appear only when we want it!

Re: Nova by Panic

#209

Post by nielsbot »

TylerE wrote: post #30
xavdid wrote: post #22

I really like their pricing structure here. If you want updates forever, it's functionally a subscription (which makes sense - constant updates require constant dev work). The key difference is that if you stop paying, you keep everything you've paid for previously (the app and all past updates). That's a _great_ way to do a subscription.

intellij is functionally the same. Buying a subscription gets you one year updates, and then whatever that last version is remains functional forever.

Sketch too. I recently re-downloaded it and they said "You can download anything up to version [x]"
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