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Nova by Panic

nova.app

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Re: Nova by Panic

#101

Post by tlamponi »

KrishnaShripad wrote: post #85
wyuenho wrote: post #32

I don't understand why every editor these days come with a minimap, and many of them turn it on by default. I know Sublime introduced it but what does it do exactly? Why is everyone copying it? It just shows you the shapes of blocks of texts of a long file from ten meters away. It doesn't tell you what they are or what they do, or even how to get there. Every IDE since at least the early 2000s gave you an index or a…

> Why not just get rid of it to free up more screen real estate for actually useful things? Like? I have an 80 column width by default. To not let my code run the entire length of screen for obvious reasons. Also, it is code smell IMHO if you have to write that much code in a single line. > I know Sublime introduced it but what does it do exactly? Why is everyone copying it? It just shows you the shapes of blocks of…

I definitively do not want to critique your workflow, that would be pretty dumb by me, just two comments to your points that I don't agree with in full.

> Like? I have an 80 column width by default. To not let my code run the entire length of the screen for obvious reasons. Also, it is code smell IMHO if you have to write that much of code in a single line.

What about a split view? I'd be far less productive if my screen wouldn't have space for 4 split view's for >> 80 columns in my editor + a small terminal split by terminal multiplexer.

> Visual cues. I can immediately know if my linter finds something wrong.

Hmm, while there are a few things like renames of variables/functions/... or (type) signature changes for that to happen outside the view one is currently editing in, it's only solving part of the problem — as other files can have those issues too and require changes, so one needs to run a check/lint test or build anyway.

Re: Nova by Panic

#102

Post by biztos »

jamil7 wrote: post #88
biztos wrote: post #81

I tried this out some months ago and had really mixed feelings, but I will give it another shot because generally speaking, Panic is awesome! My main complaints at the time were a confusing extensions ecosystem; difficulty rolling your own; and the sense that (as with Coda) "programmer" means a person hand-coding web sites with HTML+CSS and maybe Javascript or PHP. Seemed like they weren't trying to convince anybody…

> And right out of the box now, no support for Go files, not even syntax coloring, and it thinks go.mod is a media file and won't display its text. I just had a similar experience, no Go or Swift (ok understandable maybe) support out of the box. But I paid for it it anyway since I like what they’re going for and have admired the company for a long time.

I wouldn't mind not having support for any given $POPULAR_LANGUAGE out of the box -- maybe there are license issues with that -- as long as there is a good extension and it was super easy to find.

Easy to find means if I open a .go file or relevant directory, the app should ask me if I want to install support for Go files. And it should have One Approved Extension, the others should be available on request (as all are now).

If there's no good extension for a common language, I think it's on Panic to convince the community to make one, or make one themselves. One way of convincing the community would be to make it easy! (A quick look at the comments in the extension READMEs strongly implies Panic has not made it easy. The updates to the Go extensions are ~ 6 months old.)

So what's a common language? You could probably use GitHub to figure that out. If Go doesn't qualify then OK, I'll go back to my cave, but I think baking in CoffeeScript instead is pretty arbitrary.

Re: Nova by Panic

#103

Post by dgl »

artdigital wrote: post #74
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar experience, but -- possibly counter-intuitively! -- ended up going mostly all-in back on BBEdit 14 when it was released with LSP support which has proven to be a lot less, well, flaky than Nova. I like VS Code a lot and may yet return to it as my main coding editor if I go back to a big project, but BBEdit has always been my old warhorse when it comes to my technical writing because it's just such a S…

fwiw, I just checked it out again and there is a basic VIM emulation layer now

I tried out the Vim mode, it's actually one of the better emulations I've seen. Still suffers from the fact that for someone used to Vim there will be some keys you use regularly that aren't yet part of the emulation. I lasted a few days, but turns out I'm happier with actual Vim.

A shame, as they claimed to fix some of this in the newer versions... but of course my 30 day trial has expired and their model means I can't try out the fixes to see if it's actually worth paying for now.

Re: Nova by Panic

#104

Post by cercatrova »

echelon wrote: post #94
FireBeyond wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like Mailchimp! "We're never going to sell! Oh, hold up, you said twelve billion? With a B? Uhh, okay, we need to talk."

Exactly what came to my mind as well. https://medium.com/project-tinker/mailchimp-just-screwed-ove... https://slashdot.org/story/21/11/11/1634237/intuit-slashes-p... https://www.businessinsider.com/insider-weekly-mailchimp-ube... Similar situation with Epic and other firms taking on lots of investment, but freezing employees out of any gains.

That employees are "screwed over" is always a weird argument to me. Presumably these employees are free to choose the company they work for, and so they could've chosen companies that provide equity over those who don't. I was under the impression that Mailchimp paid well through salary and bonuses.

To be compensated for many years and then cry foul when the founders exit and the employee having gotten nothing (because, they chose to work there and not elsewhere) is to want to have one's cake and to eat it too.

Re: Nova by Panic

#105

Post by Klonoar »

zshbleaker wrote: post #62
jamil7 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any info on what the reasoning was here? I would assume there's a technical reason they couldn't do it rather than a business decision.

The selling point of Nova is being a native Mac citizen rather than a Electron wrapper. The VSCode Extension API heavily relies on the flexibility provided by the browser runtime which native apps like Nova cannot give.

How much experience do you have with the product in question...?

Last I checked it literally embeds a JS engine with a custom API for extensions. Unless something has changed since I last looked... but if I glance at this URL (scroll down to "Providing a TreeView") it doesn't appear to have:

https://docs.nova.app/extensions/sidebars/#defining-a-sideba...

There is simply no reason it has to be different from the VSCode API; you can set up JavaScriptCore to hook into whatever native components you need. VSCode owns the market, full stop. This should mimic the API as much as possible to enable wider extension porting.

Hell, you could cover even a fraction of the VSCode API and that would still be more useful than the current Nova extensions API.

Re: Nova by Panic

#106

Post by wyuenho »

KrishnaShripad wrote: post #85
wyuenho wrote: post #32

I don't understand why every editor these days come with a minimap, and many of them turn it on by default. I know Sublime introduced it but what does it do exactly? Why is everyone copying it? It just shows you the shapes of blocks of texts of a long file from ten meters away. It doesn't tell you what they are or what they do, or even how to get there. Every IDE since at least the early 2000s gave you an index or a…

> Why not just get rid of it to free up more screen real estate for actually useful things? Like? I have an 80 column width by default. To not let my code run the entire length of screen for obvious reasons. Also, it is code smell IMHO if you have to write that much code in a single line. > I know Sublime introduced it but what does it do exactly? Why is everyone copying it? It just shows you the shapes of blocks of…

> Like? I have an 80 column width by default. To not let my code run the entire length of screen for obvious reasons. Also, it is code smell IMHO if you have to write that much code in a single line.

There are many useful things your editor can render on screen other than code. If you've used any IDE at all, you wouldn't be saying this. File browsers, syntax tree index, class hierarchies etc. Let you imagination run wild.

> Visual cues. I can immediately know if my linter finds something wrong. It highlights it in red. Without a minimap I'll have to scroll.

Again, lack of imagination here. You only need a red icon on a status bar or something to know if your linter has found something wrong, and a counter next to it to tell you how many. If you want to go to an error, you jump from the keyboard, not use your mouse to scroll.

> or if you are using vim you would still need to ctrl+D till you find the problematic line

As an Emacs user who's seen plenty of fancy vim configs of my colleagues, I suspect you didn't even bother configuring your vim at all.

> If I am editing a Git repo, I can easily make out the additions/removals in the file. Additions in green and removals in red.

LOL. Any reasonable editor has a diff mode and allows you to zoom in and out with something like cmd +/-.

As to the breadcrumb, I wasn't saying breadcrumb was a gimmick, I was saying the minimap is a gimmick, therefore Microsoft has to introduce breadcrumb to aid navigation because the minimap just takes up space.

Re: Nova by Panic

#107

Post by wirthjason »

dawnerd wrote: post #64

I've been using the VSCode remote ssh feature for a while now and I really can't see myself switching to another editor unless it also had a similar feature. Being able to quickly configure and use a remote server is just too huge a feature to give up now. This looks great though, and the site is beautiful. Wish it was for me.

+1. I use that SSH feature every day as my primary way of coding.

Re: Nova by Panic

#109

Post by haswell »

crumbits wrote: post #108

I just can’t support Panic after they burned me and so many other Mac users with Unison.

Are you talking about Panic end-of-lifting a product but releasing a final free build?

I’m curious about which aspect you see as burning.

Re: Nova by Panic

#110

Post by wyuenho »

1123581321 wrote: post #52
wyuenho wrote: post #32

I don't understand why every editor these days come with a minimap, and many of them turn it on by default. I know Sublime introduced it but what does it do exactly? Why is everyone copying it? It just shows you the shapes of blocks of texts of a long file from ten meters away. It doesn't tell you what they are or what they do, or even how to get there. Every IDE since at least the early 2000s gave you an index or a…

Over time you learn what the various shapes in the minimap represent. It helps you generate an intuitive awareness of your location and what kind of content or data precedes and follows it--which in turn gives you more of an idea of what you're currently looking at.

You don't edit more than one file? Why would the shape meanings in one file carry over to another? Generally, the only signal that may carry over is the indentation levels. For the intuitive sense you speak of to develop, your file structures have to be highly regular across the board. TBH, I haven't even seen conventional Ruby on Rails code bases that can give me that.
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