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Nova by Panic

nova.app

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Re: Nova by Panic

#251

Post by throwaway675309 »

ihateolives wrote: post #180
hankman86 wrote: post #161

My biggest concern about this editor is actually the lack of cross-platform support. At our company, developers use a mix of Linux desktops, Windows PCs and Macs. And I think that’s actually an asset. Why force everyone onto the same platform? Developers know best what technical setup they are most productive with. Not to mention that being able to share settings and launch configurations across platforms is a big pl…

I'm truly confused about the notion of JetBrains IDEs being slow. I'm using both IDEA and VSCode, for different projects but sometimes even concurrently (because IDEA's Dart plugin is somehow dumber than VSCode's but IDEA's database explorer is so useful) and if anything then VSCode is slower with autocompletes and refactorings. Typing speed has never been issue with either so I'm really curious what sort of hardware…

Same, even when I have four large monolithic repos open in four separate instances of jetbrains, webstorm is still amazingly responsive.

Re: Nova by Panic

#252

Post by nsonha »

ThouYS wrote: post #130
nsonha wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair this "worse is better" thing permiates all aspects of tech: c++, java, python, wasteful text based protocols...

in the case of python: "better is better" ;)

as it stands right now, python is more complex and has worse type system comparing to typescript. It has all of javascript warts and more (those confusing underscore methods, GIL, pyproject.toml is only now standardized).

The good things about python have nothing to do with the language, it's the ecosystem and standard library (which is still not as good as, say, java's). So I'm not quite sure why people say javascript THE LANGUAGE is bad, but python the language is "better".

Re: Nova by Panic

#253

Post by jamil7 »

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.

I'm aware of the selling point I was asking specifically about the extension API.

Re: Nova by Panic

#254

Post by Cyberdog »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #181
Cyberdog wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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.)

What does VSC do to mitigate that?

> 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.

Well, for search, there's still grep/git grep/ag (the built-in multi-file search might actually work over SSH; never tried it since I don't use it locally either), and for git, there's still, well, git. Nova (like Coda before it) is definitely more of an editor with some IDE-like enhancements than a full IDE, and I'm fine with that (in some ways Nova is even more focused since Coda had a built-in documentation reader and MySQL client and other tools I never used). Sometimes a nice butcher's knife is more useful than a Swiss Army tool.

Re: Nova by Panic

#255

Post by echelon »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #16
echelon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

From afar it seems their strategy is "make cool shit." They published Untitled Goose Game for the Nintendo Switch, and years and years ago made some official licensed shirts for the PS2 game Katamari Damacy. They really are all over the map and it's wonderful. I imagine part of their physical location requirement is their expensive custom office ( https://panic.com/blog/the-panic-office/ )... but they do a lot of cre…

Thanks, that's the answer I was after!

(Sorry if I touched on a nerve, I was curious and a little bit skeptical.)

Re: Nova by Panic

#256

Post by Klonoar »

Skinney wrote: post #214
Klonoar wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say these things as if they're non-obvious... The fact of the matter is that VSCode's market share is massive, and expecting developers to port extensions solely because "it's a native macOS app" is not really a good pitch in 2020-2022. I would rather Panic suck it up and do the work to interop with the existing (massive) ecosystem so that those of us who like to run native apps can do so without it being a step…

I don't really see why Nova should attempt to be compatible with another editor just because they landed on JS as the integration language. It's doubtful that VS Code has the best API, and it's doubtful that VS Code's API is the best fit when the editor isn't primarily rendering HTML. Because the editor works very differently, it's unlikely they'd ever manage to make the APIs completely compatible, and because of tha…

>There are many editors out there with incompatible plugin APIs (sublime, vim, emacs, vs code, fleet etc.). There is room for Nova to do their own thing, and do their own thing better without catering to the crowd of another editor.

No, there's really not. The marketshare for a native-macOS editor is comparatively small, and they would be better served just making it work and interop well.

There is nothing special about their extensions API and there is no glory in re-forging this path.

Re: Nova by Panic

#257

Post by andrekandre »

cercatrova wrote: post #187
noduerme wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

  > 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.
honestly, that sounds like retroactive justification... bytecodes where a thing since way before js showed up, and afaik there was no technical reason it couldn't have been like that from the beginning

Re: Nova by Panic

#258

Post by PebblesHD »

KnobbleMcKnees wrote: post #159
PebblesHD wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wasteful text based protocols… Until you’re the unfortunate person trying to debug an API deployment where the team behind the API decided to use ‘much more efficient protobuffs’ making them entirely unreadable and impossible to troubleshoot. Modern processors and networks are fast enough to allow us to spend a few extra bytes making protocols easy to work with as well as ‘efficient’, and I’d argue that at scale, t…

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)

I think you’re correct, it is a tooling problem, but that’s just as valid a problem class as any other. Part of the issue with solving tooling to deal with binary formats is the lack of self documentation. Reading JSON off the wire, its structure is immediately usable and understandable, whereas in most cases for a complex API, a binary protocol requires some foreknowledge of the structure of the data coming back. In the future, if we can create an efficient combination of binary protocol and self-documenting data structure, I’ll gladly change my mind entirely.

Re: Nova by Panic

#259

Post by saagarjha »

KerrAvon wrote: post #238
saagarjha wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. If you ever poke around in the app you’ll spot platform-specific code all over the place. Sublime Text is one of the rare non-native apps that spends time caring about each platform, which generally gives them a huge boost when it comes to adapting to the platform.

Your last sentence….. The macOS version is awfully not-Maclike in ways that matter and that you can’t fix with plugins (last I checked). They’re pretty far from a native Mac editing experience, and nothing about Sublime actually requires that divergence; TextMate 2 is still a much better native-feeling experience. Edit: that said, I’ve now realized it’s been at least three years since I tried Sublime, so this could b…

I mean I know it doesn't look very Mac-like but text editing matches native controls almost 100%, and they put in at least minimal effort to make windows and state restoration and whatnot work correctly–it's far better than most other cross-platform apps. It's no TextMate, of course, but is there anything in particular that's bad aside from the UI?

Re: Nova by Panic

#260

Post by justinator »

Cyberdog wrote: post #137
justinator wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In TextMate, you can say, run a Perl/Python/PHP script within the editor, and have the output printed in a new window. r just get a syntax check done on the file you're working on. Convenient. TextMate is in comparison to Nova a little more "batteries included" in that sense - those extensions are already written and bundled within the app. Without those tools in place, it's harder to jump ship to Nova.

Ah. Well, that's still something you can do with Tasks in a manner; just write a line of shell script to invoke the interpreter with the path to the desired file, and select "On Finish" from the "Open Report" menu that's near the bottom when you edit a task.

When I get a chance, I'll check it out. I appreciate getting pointed in the right direction.
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