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Nova by Panic

nova.app

421–430 of 549 posts

Re: Nova by Panic

#421
post #181
post #95

Long-awaited. Enjoyed Coda for a long time, then switched to Atom. It looks like a polished Atom version, and Nova is likely going to replace Atom for me.

Why? (asking curiously). I used some version of Jetbrains, then Goland, then Atom.

Well, for one, many believe Atom development stalled/is slowly dying.

Re: Nova by Panic

#422
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I've had with VSCode - and also Sublime, as it happens - is that on a moderately large JS project it's something of a CPU hog. Both editors seem to do a lot of indexing, and this is even with loads of ignore folders configured. The irony is that this has driven me to try emacs. I am being driven nearly to distraction by the fact that every single operation seems to almost glory in using a different key co…

> The thing it absolutely seems to nail is performance. I'm getting zero CPU thrashing on the same project, and auto-complete-mode, whilst not quite as good as VSCode's autocomplete, is much better than Sublime's. For one thing it seems to work well across files, even when using ES5 with no typing hints. Speaking of ironic, yeah. Emacs used to be the massive resource hog, compared to it's competition (BSD vi?) back i…

Ha! I remember that. The joke had started to come unstuck a bit by the time I first used emacs in 1999/2000 (my own machine had 128MB, quickly upgraded to 256MB of RAM), and we weren't making much use of the multi-user aspects of UNIX, but it still had some currency amongst older hands in the department (and in my first job or two).

Re: Nova by Panic

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For what it's worth, I fired up BBEdit (another popular commerical Mac code editor) and pasted in some Arabic text. It didn't behave remotely correctly -- the text shifted around bizarrely as I moved the intertion point.

I think it's entirely plausible that Panic also shipped a text-layout system without full bidi support -- maybe that's why theirs is faster and less buggy on LTR text. The left-to-right language market (English, Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean...) is probably big enough to support a Mac app development studio on its own.

Re: Nova by Panic

#424
post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, the prejudice! I like developing on Windows. Especially since the programs I write are run only on Windows. That's what the specific trillion dollar industry my employer serves uses mostly on desktop. I don't want to tweak the platform. I want to concentrate on the code I write. I could be equally productive on OS X or Linux, but frankly, I don't care . They are all interchangeable computational substrates for me…

It's almost as if none of the replies read Drew's comment. Drew is talking about developing an editor for a closed source system and dealing with interfaces that break and then are hard to change, unlike open source systems that receive patches. It has nothing to do with "tweak[ing] the platform." Fixing a bug (which upstream would do, not you) is not tweaking, a bug is unintended behavior.

Yes, but I am not paid to fix the platform.

From my employers point of view it is irrelevant if I could fix the platform since they most certainly don't want to pay for it.

This is not evil. It's just how some parts of the industry work.

Re: Nova by Panic

#425
I use Sublime Text 3 for nearly all my DevOps work. I figured that I'd give Nova a try as I was a big Coda fan back in the day.

I opened up Nova and first installed HCL (language support for HashiCorp's Terraform and Packer). Then I looked for Shellcheck[1] validator, but was disappointed it did not exist. Then I search for Kubernetes and Helm wondering if there were any specific extensions, but no results. Next up was installing Dockerfile and ENV syntax highlighting.

Overall still tinkering around, but Nova seems very promising.

[1] https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck

Re: Nova by Panic

#426
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Atom is slow, VS Code is appreciably worse Honestly this isn't possible. VSC had better perf than Atom 4 years ago[1]. I say this as a long-time Sublime user, which is best-in-class[2] when it comes to perf. > I've loved being able to hack it to look and feel exactly as I want What is not customizable in VSC? When I first started using VSC, I installed an extension that made all my keybindings exactly as they were…

Since they wrote their own text rendering engine, maybe it does compete with Sublime?

They didn't write their own text rendering engine AFAIK, they wrote their own layout manager. The layout manager determines where the lines go. I'm sure they are still using Core Text to render.

Re: Nova by Panic

#427
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.

Acorn's (an image editor) model is also good: They release major versions as separate apps on the App Store; Acorn 4, Acorn 5, Acorn 6. They're permanent purchases, and only the latest version is visible but if you had purchased previous versions you can redownload them from the App Store.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/acorn-6-image-editor/id1233861...

Re: Nova by Panic

#428
post #117

I am so confused why they didn't put efforts into making this an iPad app. There is a market for something like this that developers are crying out for, but on mac why would anyone use this over VSCode (and pay $99 for the privilege?)

Does anyone seriously want to develop on the iPad?

Yes - I do it regularly. Blink SSH to get to my workstation at home + tmux + [console editor of choice]. Works great when I'm somewhere I don't want to carry my laptop to, have a cellular connection, and find a few minutes where I feel like doing some work. For context, this is day-job work in high performance computing. The only awkward part is when I'm editing papers, although I've been happy with working copy (for git) + local tex editor/compilers on the iPad. Not ideal for producing final copy, but good for editing and drafting.

Re: Nova by Panic

#429
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the Windows based laptops have a similar touchpad like the Mac which just works, last time I checked they did not.

Can you explain why this is such an important feature? How often are you writing code where you're not at your desk with a real keyboard and mouse?

The Mac's trackpad is so good that you dont really need a mouse when writing code. I use the trackpad more at my office desk.
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