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Nova 9

nova.app

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Re: Nova 9

#91

Post by procinct »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #79
nfadili wrote: post #22

Deal breaker for me (last time I checked it out) was the lack of a built in git diff. I don't need anything fancy, but I can't live in an editor without it. Does anybody know if this is planned or workable in later versions?

I know it's not what you asked for, but I used to use the one is VS Code exclusively. Now I use Sublime Merge 90% of the time and it's been a huge benefit to my workflow. I didn't expect it to win me over, but I instinctively reach for it now.

+1 for sublime merge. I used to purely use the terminal for git but had tried other GUI clients extensively like GitKraken. Sublime Merge is just on a completely different tier of software. It has no abstractions really over git itself (you can see the commands it executes) and it is fast as all hell. It was the first GUI client that I feel actually improved my git usage. Outstanding piece of software.

Re: Nova 9

#92

Post by procinct »

btreecat wrote: post #73

Docker on mac just...sucks. So I don't develop on mac. Remote debugging sucks, so I don't like to setup a pure remote env for development. Maybe I just have Linux-colored lenses but I am not sure I see this product having huge growth potential given it's intentionally small target audience.

Developers using a mac is probably a larger audience size than you are imagining.

Re: Nova 9

#93

Post by herrherrmann »

Tried out Nova once again today after a long break since version 1. I’m a web developer who primarily uses TypeScript and I’m unfortunately still pretty disappointed about Nova. Things like autocompletion and file browsing are significantly slower and more tedious than in VS Code and I can only cover about 50% of the features and extensions I use on a daily basis (e.g. there seems to be no way to find all instances/usages of a function aside from a plain text search).

I’d love for Nova to happen because competition is important and it’d be great to have more native alternatives but in its current state I can’t recommend Nova to anyone yet.

Re: Nova 9

#94

Post by kstrauser »

parkersweb wrote: post #83

There was a rumour some years ago (based on a tweet from a member of staff there) that Panic were working on an email app for mobile devices. Even now I still hope that rumour is true - a genuinely well designed email app made the usual high standard of polish synonymous with Panic software would be amazing.

I'd probably pay good money for this. Mail.app is "good enough" that I haven't bothered switching to another client, especially as the ones I'd otherwise consider have security issues I'm uncomfortable with. I'm certainly open to it, though.

Re: Nova 9

#95

Post by kstrauser »

yboris wrote: post #87
gherkinnn wrote: post #82

Time to give it another try! But I struggle to use it without a git diff view. It can’t come soon enough.

Try diff2html - just a single npm install command away from viewing your diffs in your browser whenever you run "diff2html" in your terminal (pro tip: alias "diff" to the command). https://diff2html.xyz/

diff-so-fancy[0] is lovely in a terminal. Still, it's nice having a competent Git client inside an editor so you can get a quick visual indicator of what's changed. For example, Magit inside Emacs is freaking amazing.

[0] https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy

Re: Nova 9

#96

Post by eyelidlessness »

lekevicius wrote: post #76
eyelidlessness wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty likely they will either continue to develop Nova, or replace it with a newer app, indefinitely. They’ve been consistently shipping a code editor (Coda until 2020, now replaced with Nova) since 2007. Apart from uncharacteristically losing interest, I think the only reason they’d stop developing Nova or some spiritual successor is becoming unsustainable as a business. Fortunately for Panic, there are st…

Coda was quite dead before relaunch as Nova. Even if not outright discontinued, if Nova got to the stage Coda 3 was, that would not be great.

I mean, ‘they stopped releasing to go back and do it better’ doesn’t feel less dedicated.

Re: Nova 9

#98

Post by sparker72678 »

hit8run wrote: post #90

I bought a license some time ago because I want a native Mac IDE to succeed! I use Nova for Rails development and it feels quite pleasing. I also use Jetbrains and Sublime but avoid VSCode wherever I can. Too many plugins and not enough out of the box combined with less intelligent refactoring (Jetbrains is unbeaten here). Nova is amazing fresh air and whenever an update lands it’s like a little present and I get exc…

I really want to use Nova for my Rails projects but keep going back to RubyMine because the code completion/jumping just isn’t even close, imo.

Re: Nova 9

#100

Post by chipotle_coyote »

I see a lot of "but how will this compete against Visual Studio Code," and the answer is kind of "it won't, but so what?" I presume Panic is smart enough to structure the pricing so they don't need to get a kabillion users for this to be financially viable. Moving to add multi-language interactive debugging with breakpoint support in Nova 9 kind of suggests the ultimate goal is to be less "expensive VS Code (but native!)" than "lighter-weight JetBrains (and native!)", which is intriguing.

Having said that, its flakier-than-a-kouign-amann LSP support was a big stumbling block for me. Ironically, the oldest native macOS editor, BBEdit, now has pretty solid LSP support -- with many servers, you can just install them through npm and they're automatically picked up and used correctly. With Nova, sometimes they come installed, sometimes they say they come installed but really don't, sometimes they don't work for mysterious reasons, sometimes they explode and send flaming bits of code cascading across your screen. (Metaphorically.) Also, the last time I tried it (around v7, back in August: they're kind of ripping through version numbers, aren't they?), Nova's native autocompletion, which clearly tries to be smart and language-aware, behaved pretty inscrutably, generally much worse than TextMate's old "just offer to complete a word somewhere already in the document" approach.

I'll probably try Nova again, but for both Elixir and PHP, BBEdit is unglamorous but actually pretty solid for me. (I don't do much in JavaScript currently so haven't dug into that yet; I may see about trying to bring BBEdit's Ruby on Rails support up to par, too.)

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