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Nova by Panic

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Re: Nova by Panic

#531

Does anyone have React Native + TypeScript development/debugging experience with Nova? I'm currently using Vscode, and I'm wondering if I should have a look at Nova for this. (Nothing wrong with Vscode, I'm a bit into adventure)

I will be giving it a go for the next few days to see if it'll work for React Native development.

I'd love to know how it goes and any significant upsides/downsides.

Re: Nova by Panic

#532
post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I use a dedicated keyboard, but I put the MacBook on side and use the trackpad as my mouse. It's smooth to use, has great gesture support for switching between applications. And the most important feature for me. I can work a full day on it without any RSI related symptons. No other mouse can do that for me. I use a normal mouse on my gaming rig, though. Because trackpads are awful for gaming.

> has great gesture support for switching between applications.

There are keyboard shortcuts for those, which are even nicer imo. Reduces the amount of times you need to take your hands off the keyboard.

Re: Nova by Panic

#533
post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a dedicated keyboard, but I put the MacBook on side and use the trackpad as my mouse. It's smooth to use, has great gesture support for switching between applications. And the most important feature for me. I can work a full day on it without any RSI related symptons. No other mouse can do that for me. I use a normal mouse on my gaming rig, though. Because trackpads are awful for gaming.

> has great gesture support for switching between applications. There are keyboard shortcuts for those, which are even nicer imo. Reduces the amount of times you need to take your hands off the keyboard.

I used those before I got a MacBook. But then I found the hand gestures to be more intuitive.

Re: Nova by Panic

#534

Earlier 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…

Like you I immediately had disbelief. However to most people assembling a pipeline like the one you indicated is equivalent to a new layout engine.... it struck me as normal to use "from scratch" here.

That's fair, the text rabbit hole goes fairly deep and most people aren't aware of the complexities at play. Implementing the glue on its own isn't a trivial task, so the work may have felt like doing it "from scratch". I only took issue with the wording and wanted to be a bit more precise with it on this thread.

Re: Nova by Panic

#535
I really wish there was c support. At least c syntax highlighting. Seems like an awesome editor, but lacking c, c++ and rust support is a real bummer

Re: Nova by Panic

#536
post #261

> 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…

To me, the quote and what you put after came as a big surprise - I was ready to nod in agreement as you recognize this as a sad story about the platform. The last time I was working on a text editor (KDE's Kate) and found a bug in the text layout engine it was written against (Qt's), I wrote a patch, submitted it upstream and it made everyone else's apps better, too. I can't imagine the world of hurt, discomfort and…

> 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.

"our joy at Panic comes from building things that feel truly, well, Mac-like"

Re: Nova by Panic

#537

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…

> I could work on desktop Linux accessibility, for the vanishingly small number of blind people who use desktop Linux

> one of my blind programmer friends just switched to Windows

Where they happy that their choices were being reduced to using a closed source operating system, now forever being dependent on the support of a giant corporation, partially because their friends like to write code that "actually reaches people" instead of contributing to an open and accessible solution used by a vanishingly small number of blind people?

Re: Nova by Panic

#538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

All the time. But more to the point: Apple has proven it _can_ be that good, so I want a control that _is_ that good. Why would I ever go backwards?

Because like they just pointed out, you can only use this magical touchpad on a Mac running MacOS.

It's not like Apple benevolently gave this touchpad to the world, for our betterment and happiness, but for the singular, exclusive purpose of luring you into their ecosystem. But you don't benefit when they profit, you were the prize.

You should demand they give it away for free, because you should not give a shit about their profit because they (it) do not give a shit about your life or freedom or the economy of the social strata you live in. It's an alien machine that will eat you or it will fight you but it won't know the difference.

For me it's this, it's been proven I can get an OS that is open and free, doesn't mean I have to support and buy into some terrible multinational corporation whose goals I do not agree with, and that I get to have control over my own OS in a sense that is utterly freeing compared to MacOS or Windows. So why would I ever go backwards?

Re: Nova by Panic

#539
post #505
post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then when you go back to something terminal based, like Vim, it becomes clear...

To be fair if you get a few plugins for web dev running vim/nvim does slow down a quite a bit.

I have a zillion plugins and vim is still snappy. Plus, editing requires so much less effort that it'd be better even if there was lag, which there isn't.

Re: Nova by Panic

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will be giving it a go for the next few days to see if it'll work for React Native development.

I'd love to know how it goes and any significant upsides/downsides.

Ok, so some feedback: I'm sad to report I stopped testing already. For my particular job I tend to debug and work with large files, especially JSON. A lot of debugging apps and looking through large crash logs, then looking at application states. This is probably not typical, but it's crucial to me.

The transition is made hard because of the odd default key mappings (they hotkey editor is very difficult to use. I went back and forward and couldn't understand why my mappings weren't working only to find that it was due to having to use the hotkey editor in a specific way). I really think a good keymapping is the first hurdle people have to overcome, so shipping it with an hotkey extension for Sublime, VSCode, etc. would be a big win off the line.

The autocomplete and jump to definition seemed to work well. I had a hard time figuring out if "Find references" were working. It kept telling me to go to some obscure tab or place somewhere but since it's all symbols, I don't know where to actually go. VSCode is easy by comparison - a "peek" window shows up prioritized references.

However, Nova is a no-go for me because it simply stalls when opening a >2 MB JSON files. Forget about trying to search-replace - it's simply too slow. In defense of Nova, Sublime also can't deal with it.

My impression going away from Nova is: It's like Xcode and VSCode had a baby. Perhaps with time it'll improve in performance and be fine tuned to a point where I can use it daily - but given it's primarily paid (not "free with nag screen" like sublime), I can't review it any time soon again.

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