Very interesting editor. I would love an editor like this on Windows! Please please port it :)
Nova by Panic
361–370 of 549 posts
Re: Nova by Panic
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sketch too. I recently re-downloaded it and they said "You can download anything up to version [x]"
Sketch has been like that for a while. The app now has a special licensing setup that restricts your installs to two machines. Sketch made a thing about leaving the App Store. But the App Store licensing and update process was way better than what it has evolved to.
> The app now has a special licensing setup that restricts your installs to two machines.
That's the one thing that pushed me to Figma.
It was bad enough that it's MacOS only. Now I can only have it on 2 machines?
Re: Nova by Panic
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 C…
For a text editor, why not just drop BiDi? I guess it sucks if you use a BiDi language for your comments, but there’s nothing per se wrong in making a solution that doesn’t work for everyone around the world if it works better for a subset of people.
You'd also want BiDi for general-purpose "text" documents like markdown. There are many aspects of text rendering that aren't necessarily relevant here (think: word- and line-breaking) but directionality strikes me as a major feature.
Re: Nova by Panic
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm sure there's a VSC plugin for that This part of your comments nails 100% why, for me (web developer, 90% in typescript these days), it's nearly impossible to justify paying for an IDE. Visual Studio code has almost everything that I need, and what it's not baked in, is easily done with a plug-in, which in the worst case I can write myself. But that's really a worst case scenario, since to this date it has never…
> it's nearly impossible to justify paying for an IDE. The reason I pay for IntelliJ IDEA is exactly the fact that I don't have to install any plugins, or fiddle with config settings, or really do much of anything; the product works extremely well out of the box with all of the IDE features I would ever want (and then some). The last time I seriously tried VS Code[0], I felt like I was constantly trying different plu…
I’m a heavy pycharm user and have found there are plugins that handle gaps in the IDE.
Some of them are for minor customization like hot keys to move tabs. But the product doesn’t support Environment Variable configuration very well.
For example, Pycharm can’t injest a .env file. The devs point at a plug-in, but that doesn’t cover runtime and terminal / python shell.
Re: Nova by Panic
#365That website though—genuinely made me smile. I love the star field animation and the warp-drive effect when you hover over the "download" button.
Re: Nova by Panic
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Vim support is more than just key bindings. The most powerful thing about Vim is that it’s modal, ie. you have several editing modes - insert, normal, replace, visual, all with their own set of commands.
I can do away Vim itself. It's the modal editing feature that I really need. That's why I am satisfied with IdeaVim even if it is not a full blown Vim instance.
Re: Nova by Panic
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does look like it uses Cocoa. What are you seeing that doesn't look like Cocoa? Custom controls doesn't count; those can still be based on NSView and use other Cocoa controls in their implementation.
Even if NSView-backed, custom views that replace basic functionality aren’t really native to me. Here, the entire window frame, all widgets, etc. are not native. It looks, to me, like an Electron or RN “app”.
> Custom views that replace basic functionality
The only custom controls I see are the tabs, tab bar, and a few modals (like when opening a new tab), and a handful of buttons and segmented controls in the sidebar. Everything else is native, unmodified Cocoa controls: NSWindow, preference window and its contained controls, the sidebar, etc.
I actually am a bit curious about the decision to have those NSButtons with custom backgrounds … they don't really look right both on Catalina or Big Sur. Native-looking NSButtons are used everywhere else, though.
> the entire window frame
About the only thing that looks unusual here is the custom buttons at the top-left with the diagonal lines. No more custom than Xcode, iTunes.
If the problem is that the toolbar seems to be in the titlebar, that's been an accepted, Cocoa-supported window style for a long time — and much more prevalent in Big Sur.
It has the correct translucency behaviour in Big Sur. Maybe one day they'll update it to use Big Sur-style full-height sidebars.
> It looks, to me, like an Electron or RN "app"
Electron and React Native apps wish they could integrate with Cocoa as well as this.
Those never look like anything more than a plain NSWindow with a plain, thin titlebar with a web view inside — or worse, not even an NSWindow but one painted with custom controls.
Re: Nova by Panic
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
They answered that in the first line of the page > native Mac code editor Looks much more native and likely faster than electron based editors like vscode or Atom.
I use sublime though which is native as well.
Native code but cross platform UI. It doesn't support Services[1], for example.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Re: Nova by Panic
#369Re: Nova by Panic
#370Anyone 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…
Good IDEs allow you to change the layout or hide unnecessary parts.