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Nova by Panic

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Re: Nova by Panic

#181

Post by unfocussed_mike »

Cyberdog wrote: post #145
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.

Nova does let you have projects with files accessed over a SSH connection. From the Launcher (project browser) window, select "Add Project…", then "Add Remote Project…"

I'm sure it does fine at that, but there are perils with SSHFS-type access (like file corruption risks when you switch between editing machines.)

And this really doesn't get close to what Visual Studio Code's Remote editing functionality can do. The Remote mode operates a full remote VSC environment over SSH or as a docker container, and that means things like being able to do find and replace at the remote end in the editor, but also manage git at the remote end using the built-in source control etc., but also it means support for extensions and build tools that run remotely.

It is astonishing.

I too cannot imagine going back to an editor that cannot do this. It has been so useful in conjunction with vagrant boxes, with a bit of ssh_config magic I wrote here that manages an ssh_config include file that (amazingly) VSC will follow:

(warning: ugly)

https://github.com/bbenoist/vscode-vagrant/issues/18#issueco...

Re: Nova by Panic

#182

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Nova by Panic

#183

Post by bodge5000 »

echelon wrote: post #12
micromacrofoot wrote: post #5

I've admired Panic for the entirety of my career, they're always doing really nice work, and I'm glad they're still going strong in a time where native desktop apps aren't really the du jour.

Quoted post unavailable.

Looks like they do offer remote, you just have to live in the US (which is a shame, but understandable for financial reasons and all that)

Re: Nova by Panic

#184

Post by phgn »

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.

Interestingly, when I first saw this thread I thought Nova was an alternative to XCode. An actual native alternative for writing Swift -- Panic seems like in the best position to do that. But no, webdev it is.

Re: Nova by Panic

#185

Post by phgn »

bovermyer wrote: post #8

I really wanted to like Nova. I paid for it (and used it) for a year. In the end, though... I switched back to VS Code. Native apps like this are much faster than such things, but I had too many use cases for the plugins. Kind of the same experience as Sublime Text. It's _really fast_, but I just rely too much on plugins when the experience requires something more than vim.

I don't understand why they're not supporting the VSCode extensions format [0]. There could be a different UI integration, but why duplicate the rest?

Maybe they're really targeting a different audience.

[0] https://open-vsx.org/

Re: Nova by Panic

#186

Post by KrishnaShripad »

tlamponi wrote: post #101
KrishnaShripad wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sc…

> 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.

This includes using split views. Of course I have to mention that I use Mac as my primary development machine (which comes with 5K retina display). So already have plenty of real estate. It might be an issue on laptops. But I haven't tried it to give feedback on that. I just gave my personal anecdote.

> so one needs to run a check/lint test or build anyway

If your entire team is already using lint from the start you wouldn't have to worry about it. Even if not, you would have typically run the linter when you cloned the repo. The build process should have lint as a pre-step anyways. So the chances of you having non linted files elsewhere is minimal. And when you rename functions/variables you can rename as symbol, which will change it in all files that reference it. If you have the right workflow setup you wouldn't have to worry about other files being affected.

Re: Nova by Panic

#187

Post by cercatrova »

noduerme wrote: post #168
cercatrova wrote: post #98

I tried Nova when it first launched and again recently, and I switched back to VSCode due to the numerous plugins and prodigious output of its creators every month. In my opinion, Nova (through its lack) shows the true power of network effects, even in code editors, because even though VSCode is an inferior product in many respects, like speed and resource usage, it still wins due to its sheer popularity and extensib…

> it is the story of JavaScript itself: a bad language that only works due to its popularity This is a profound observation that gets to the heart of the matter with both VSCode and Javascript, both of which I resisted as long as humanly possible. What gives them the greatest utility is that they're immensely popular, in spite of not being the best tool for the job . I came to VS from 10+ years in Eclipse, and to Jav…

I've heard a hypothesis saying that JS endures because it's bad, otherwise it would've been subsumed by other languages and we never would've been fed up with it to create Webassembly, which is more optimized for its use case than what the other languages we might've used instead of JS.

In other words, feeling the pain of JS over 20 years led to the creation of WASM that might not have been as needed had we had good languages on the web present.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pBYqen3B2gc

Re: Nova by Panic

#188

Post by KrishnaShripad »

wyuenho wrote: post #106
KrishnaShripad wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

Which is already available in the VS Code Sidebar. You have everything you mention in VS Code already.

> 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.

Which I already get in VS Code. I am talking about advantages I get with mini map. I don't want to use my keyboard or the mouse to know where the problem is (if any). I can get 10000 ft view of my entire code in the mini map without having to touch my keyboard or mouse. You won't get it if you haven't used an editor with mini map functionality for a period of time.

> 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.

I just gave you my take on VS Code features that I like.

I have configured Vim according to my liking. I use Vim within VSCode. But what use is that for this discussion? I don't want to take any extra steps to know the status of the file. I get that with the mini map. I don't want to touch the mouse or keyboard to know where the problem is. Or which part of the code I want to instantly navigate to.

> introduce breadcrumb to aid navigation

You literally have a file browser in VS Code in the sidebar. Apart from that you have a Command Palette that you can invoke to navigate between pages. Why would you need breadcrumb to aid navigation?

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

I am talking about what I like about the minimap. All editors have diff mode including VSCode. I want to see it at a glance without having to touch my keyboard or mouse. Not use cmd +/- to zoom in and out. All these introduce extra steps that I just don't want to do.

Re: Nova by Panic

#189

Post by nsonha »

matteotom wrote: post #176
KnobbleMcKnees wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a tools problem though. Bytes and hex aren't readable until you decide then to characters and use a text renderer to display the. I can't imagine this isnt possible with protobuf and the right debugging tools (though it's not my area of expertise)

Sometimes you just want to dump the bytes that are going over the wire. Sure you could pipe the output to a protobuf parser, but then you'd need to make sure the output of tcpdump or ngrep or whatever is what the parser expects. As an example, I needed to track down why some service traffic was getting misrouted, and I found the problem by tcpdumping the traffic and realizing one service was silently corrupting a hea…

> until someone runs the numbers and finds something more efficient would improve performance or save money by a significant enough amount

This argument must be the ultimate defense in code review. The thing is, we have the field of theoretical computer science and things like big O so that we can reason about code without having to do benchmarks about every little thing, because that's impossible in practice.

Regarding protocols, I'd argue that the most important thing for them is to be efficient, at least when IO is still the biggest bottleneck of computing. The other comment already points out debug being a tooling problem.

Re: Nova by Panic

#190

Post by brailsafe »

daydream wrote: post #42
bovermyer wrote: post #8

I really wanted to like Nova. I paid for it (and used it) for a year. In the end, though... I switched back to VS Code. Native apps like this are much faster than such things, but I had too many use cases for the plugins. Kind of the same experience as Sublime Text. It's _really fast_, but I just rely too much on plugins when the experience requires something more than vim.

About a year ago I decided it was time to finally modernize my Python coding setup. I really, really wanted to use Nova, would have paid full price no problem, but for some reason the one main Python plugin was extremely flaky for me. Linter highlighting would sometimes work and sometimes not, unaffected by the plugin settings, and the primary Python plugin I was using was based on somebody’s github repro that hadn’t…

Is there a reason you didn't go with PyCharm? I tried vscode, and it works out of the box for particular things, but Pycharm is just a breeze on latger projects.
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