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Nova by Panic

nova.app

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Re: Nova by Panic

#191

Post by brailsafe »

I managed to make Nova work for some trivial frontend stuff, but not having a built-in robust git client really threw my workflow off. I don't really like using a separate terminal for diffing, nor do I like the default diff viewer for git anyway, nor do I want to buy Kaleidoscope for a billion dollars for that one thing, which would be an external viewer anyway. Yes I want a native mac app, but it doesn't really count as a better experience if some of my interactions are slightly more spiffy and some key things aren't present at all. I do like something that is just a good text editor like TextMate was, but Coda and Nova were always trying to be in this middle-ground area. Macrabbit used to have a great app for thibg called Espresso which I loved for just CSS, HTML, and Basic JS. I'd give Nova another shot in a second if there was a significant feature-rich update, that includes things that other people rightfully get hung-up on.

Nova has something unique in both a product and market. The customer-base is willing to give it repeated shots before totally writing it off, and that's a blessing that the majority of companies don't get.

Re: Nova by Panic

#192

Post by dewey »

coldtea wrote: post #162
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…

> 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! Are they? They have a long history of getting bored with projects and cancelling them or letting them languish. Not the best assurance for a long term commitment like an editor...

Abandoning projects is something I'd connect with other companies, not Panic. I'm using Transmit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmit_(file_transfer_tool)) for more than 10 years already.

That at some point they have to sunset tools that are not used by people any more (Like the Newsnet client, from what I remember) makes sense to me. It doesn't feel like they are just abandoning projects because there's something new and shiny to work on.

Re: Nova by Panic

#193

Post by dewey »

brailsafe wrote: post #191

I managed to make Nova work for some trivial frontend stuff, but not having a built-in robust git client really threw my workflow off. I don't really like using a separate terminal for diffing, nor do I like the default diff viewer for git anyway, nor do I want to buy Kaleidoscope for a billion dollars for that one thing, which would be an external viewer anyway. Yes I want a native mac app, but it doesn't really cou…

Maybe something like https://git-fork.com would work for you? It has a decent enough diff viewer (Even though I prefer Kaleidoscope for bigger rebases), is native and an actively developed indie app. I'm a happy user and can recommend it.

Re: Nova by Panic

#194

Post by mobilio »

dewey wrote: post #192
coldtea wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! Are they? They have a long history of getting bored with projects and cancelling them or letting them languish. Not the best assurance for a long term commitment like an editor...

Abandoning projects is something I'd connect with other companies, not Panic. I'm using Transmit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmit_(file_transfer_tool) ) for more than 10 years already. That at some point they have to sunset tools that are not used by people any more (Like the Newsnet client, from what I remember) makes sense to me. It doesn't feel like they are just abandoning projects because there's somethi…

Transmit was killer app that convince me that Coda would be awesome.

More than 10 years i'm using them both.

Re: Nova by Panic

#195

Post by m_fayer »

sterlind wrote: post #129
biztos wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

I think they're just heavily and narrowly targeting webdevs. Python for Django, Ruby for Rails, PHP, then a whole bunch of CSS/React-y stuff I'm not too familiar with. I'm sure people use Go for back ends, but it's more for systems right?

When I looked at the list of natively-supported languages, which are not only webdev-focused but also exclusively dynamically-typed, I felt a blast-from-the-past from around a decade ago. Back when Mac-armed developers writing rails apps were culturally ascendant, and statically typed languages and SQL were uncool corporate dinosaurs. Maybe this company is still living in that time...

Re: Nova by Panic

#196

Post by wyuenho »

KrishnaShripad wrote: post #188
wyuenho wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> I can get 10000 ft view of my entire code in the mini map without having to touch my keyboard or mouse.

This is exactly what I'm trying to understand. Why? What *actionable* information does it give you that you can't get from a red bar next to the scroll bar or the error total on the status bar?

> 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.

Why do you need to know where? Just jump to the first one from the keyboard. When you are done fixing one, jump to the next one from the keyboard until all of them are fixed. It's not like you can compile or commit before all of them are fixed anyway, and it's not like you can jump to the errors just by looking at the minimap.

> 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?

Because that's the only mechanism that will take you to exactly where you want in the syntax tree hierarchy within the same file. It's not great as it only takes you up and down one path, but it's better than having to click on a screenful in the minimap and then having to scan the entire screenful to find the thing you are searching for because all you have is the shape, you aren't even sure what exactly it is.

> I want to see it at a glance without having to touch my keyboard or mouse.

Why? Your compiler or linter or precommit script won't let you proceed without having them fixed anyway. What does it matter where in relation to everything else a blurry red line is in the file? If there's any type checking in your tooling, typically one error is going to lead to dozens and often half of the file will be red. The most useful information is the root cause of a massive error, how does a minimap help you besides telling you you broke half of your code in a file?

Re: Nova by Panic

#197

Post by 88 »

dewey wrote: post #192
coldtea wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! Are they? They have a long history of getting bored with projects and cancelling them or letting them languish. Not the best assurance for a long term commitment like an editor...

Abandoning projects is something I'd connect with other companies, not Panic. I'm using Transmit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmit_(file_transfer_tool) ) for more than 10 years already. That at some point they have to sunset tools that are not used by people any more (Like the Newsnet client, from what I remember) makes sense to me. It doesn't feel like they are just abandoning projects because there's somethi…

Guess you weren’t one of the lucky people who bought and paid for Transmit on iOS…

https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-transmit-ios/

Re: Nova by Panic

#198

Post by pmontra »

p0larboy wrote: post #96

Nothing to do with the IDE but I just want to point out that the homepage design is sick. The 3D space in the background did not affect the scroll performance and it adds a really good vibe without affecting the UX. Love it!

There was a design like that for another news yesterday or the day before. I wonder if we're headed back into the 80s with web design. It happened with clothes a few years ago (very high waist jeans.) There was no web in the 80s but there were arcade games and that front page looks like the start screen of some game back at the time. We'll see if it trends.

Re: Nova by Panic

#199

Post by lawtalkinghuman »

api wrote: post #47
svnpenn wrote: post #31

Highlighting support is bad: > For the curious, Nova has built-in support for CoffeeScript, CSS, Diff, ERB, Haml, HTML, INI, JavaScript, JSON, JSX, Less, Lua, Markdown, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Sass, SCSS, Smarty, SQL, TSX, TypeScript, XML, and YAML. Youre supporting stuff like Diff and Haml, but not stuff like Go or Rust?

Their ecosystem seems very web-centric.

Yep. Panic have always made tools that are mostly aimed at front-end web devs. Coda, the editor that became Nova, was marketed as a "web editor". Nova specifically still uses that phrase "web editor".

Coda's main competitors back in the day included tools like CSSEdit and Espresso, tools that helped those working on CSS by giving a nice front-end where you could click around in the UI and it'd insert the relevant properties for each style without you having to remember the syntax, and then updating a live preview. All of which seems rather quaint now we have pretty good developer tools in most browsers, but back in the mid-to-late 2000s, that was a big deal for a lot of web devs.

And for web developers who are writing predominantly HTML and CSS (possibly with some kind of template wrapping), a bit of JS, and a teeny bit of PHP/whatever on the backend, "it doesn't support Rust" etc. is not a major problem for them.

Re: Nova by Panic

#200

Post by jonwinstanley »

coldtea wrote: post #162
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…

> 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! Are they? They have a long history of getting bored with projects and cancelling them or letting them languish. Not the best assurance for a long term commitment like an editor...

I'd say yes, Panic are definitely awesome. The software they build is always high quality and their forays into games and hardware has been great. Part of the reason I like them is they are small (compared to Microsoft at least) and independent, so I suppose there is always the chance that they will have to abandon a project to be able to stay afloat.
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