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Nova by Panic

nova.app

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Re: Nova by Panic

#471
post #130

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.

The proactive indexing sure does require a decent CPU and a good bunch of RAM, but most developers have both these days. I've noticed on Windows that anti-virus is a major bottleneck for Jetbrains editors, even with a decent CPU and plenty of RAM.

In my experience, the lazy autocomplete takes less resources at start but the result is that autocomplete suggestions are loaded in as files are being parsed. The larger projects grow, the slower this process is.

I suppose slower CPUs like the i3 series and low i5 series Intel chips will probably have a lot of trouble with the indexing. You need a laptop with a decent sustained core speed to do the work (which can be a major deal breaker in cheap Windows laptops and the lower tier Macbooks), but the few seconds wait you get on a professional machine when a project gets loaded in is well worth the wait to me.

Re: Nova by Panic

#472
post #28

I love native Mac apps, I love Panic…but I’m not sure what this gets me over Visual Studio Code, besides a Preferences pane that isn’t inscrutable. I’m not sure there’s enough of a market on the Mac for another commercial code editor, as we already have BBEdit for hard-core text wrangling. (And obviously all the open-source options.)

I think it's for people that want their text editor to feel like a Mac app. VS Code is great, but it doesn't feel very Apple-y.

I'm not sure whether I'd consider Nova to feel that much more "Apple-y", especially when that meant something. BBEdit does that, this just feels a bit too MacOS/iOS convergent.

Re: Nova by Panic

#473

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. Th…

You had a look at Textmate lately? It's still getting updates and works as nice as it ever did.

Re: Nova by Panic

#474
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?

Minimap => Waist of valuable screen space, even on my 42 inch 4K monitor...

Re: Nova by Panic

#475
Tried it out a few minutes. While I like the polish, this cannot (yet) compete with Sublime Text for me (and remote editting is one of the major weaknesses of Sublime currently, even with available extensions, while it looks as if it might be one of the strengths of Nova).

It already starts with the editor itself, which has only one word wrapping mode (the other mode is horizontal scrolling), where it will wrap the lines at pretty arbitrary locations due to its desire to implement "word" wrapping, instead of also offering a simple mode which simply breaks the current work :-(

If basic editting does not fit my style, it is a no go no matter what other niceties it might have, once the extension stuff starts going for real.

Re: Nova by Panic

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It boggles the mind that anyone who can write code would ever use a closed source operating system. Some of us want our work to actually reach people who don't write code or sysadmin their own computer, i.e. most people in the world. I, for one, think my effort is wasted if it doesn't benefit those people. So while working exclusively on a free-software platform is tempting from an ideological purity point of view…

Working on a free software platform is not mutually exclusive with reaching the majority of end-users. You can develop web apps for example or use cross platform toolkits for native apps. That's what I do and it works great.

One of the major selling points of the Editor posted here is that it isn't a cross platform app or built with web tech. Those already exist and it's great that we have choices but some developers like Panic have carved out a niche selling software thats very specific and tightly integrated into the platform. For those developers using the platform they're developing for makes a lot of sense.

Re: Nova by Panic

#477
post #391

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…

> It's free and open source, it's available on Windows, MacOS, Linux, and it can also be ported to the web Common misconception. VSC's most novel/valuable features are not open source. VSC is only "open core"; all of the real value-adds are proprietary and cannot legally be forked/reused. > One VSC feature that's been quite the remote lifesaver is shared sessions with voice chat. Like that one.

Like what? The remote editing extensions come to mind (although there are open source alternatives), but what else?

Re: Nova by Panic

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can't imagine the world of hurt, discomfort and frustration of developing against a lib set I can't read source code of or improve. Thank you . It boggles the mind that anyone who can write code would ever use a closed source operating system.

> It boggles the mind that anyone who can write code would ever use a closed source operating system. Some of us want our work to actually reach people who don't write code or sysadmin their own computer, i.e. most people in the world. I, for one, think my effort is wasted if it doesn't benefit those people. So while working exclusively on a free-software platform is tempting from an ideological purity point of view…

Or you could realize that your "mission" would be to break the chicken-and-egg problem, write more end-user-facing software in an open platform so that non-developers can actually enjoy the same benefits that developers do.

Someone has to do it. If you have the skills, why not you?

Re: Nova by Panic

#479
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed they did. I also fondly remember how wonderful the web development deployment workflow was in Coda. This was back before source control was ubiquitous and CI/CD was required for any real production environment. It was the cleanest way I'd seen to go from saving in your test editor and having a clear path to SFTP it to the server. I half recoil in horror and am still in awe of how considered their experience wa…

> This was back before source control was ubiquitous Your memory may be playing tricks on you, it wasn't that long ago. Coda 1 had SVN support out of the box, and at the time SVN was already old and in decline, not to mention CVS and other lesser source control systems. By the time Coda 2 came out, git had won the DVCS battle, and was built into it. Now, granted, back then I wasn't very keen on version control either…

From my memory in the mid 2000 version control and automatized deploys weren't ubiquitous for the audience Coda mainly targeted: web site development.

I started my career at around that time in a company using Python for web application development and everything was in SVN but already in the progress of being moved to git and while there wasn't a CI/CD server, all deploys were done running a single cli command. On the other hand for years to come I have seen e.g. people and agencies doing websites in Wordpress making changes directly in production.

In that circles, which often included people with no heavy technical background like designers that learned some php/html/css Coda was quite a relevation I think.

Re: Nova by Panic

#480
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDEA has the lead on raw features (and integration, since all the core plugins are made in-house), but at least on macOS the editor performs like trash. There are hundreds of milliseconds' latency for nearly every interaction, and that's despite spinning up the fans and impacting the rest of the system. I'm not a latency-buff; I happily used Atom until VSCode came along. But IDEA is unbearable in my experience (again…

There are known issues with scaled resolutions on macOS and JetBrains IDEs. If that is the case for you, using a tool like resolutionator to scale instead of the native macOS scaler, should solve the performance issues.

I wonder what makes the scaling in macOS difficult. For years Firefox would eat through my battery in no time if scaling was enabled.
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