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Nova by Panic

nova.app

281–290 of 549 posts

Re: Nova by Panic

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's for people that want their text editor to feel like a Mac app. VS Code is great, but it doesn't feel very Apple-y.

Honestly all it took for VSC to feel Apple-y was a re-skin.

That can make it look Apple-y but not feel Apple-y. And even then, it's a WindowBlinds kind of Apple-y.

Re: Nova by Panic

#283

I feel if a domain has a very well evolving, competitive open source offering (VS Code), it's really hard to sell something else if the feature difference isn't big. Perhaps they should have started by targeting something other than web development.

Nova feels like an editor for 10, 15 years ago when they were making Coda. It feels like its for when you have a bunch of simple static HTML files and maybe a sass watcher. These days, web development got both more mature, complicated, and simpler, all in ways that makes it hard for Nova to make sense.

Agreed. It still feels very much like it's focused on something like wordpress with the sync features so prominent.

Re: Nova by Panic

#284
Does anyone have React Native + TypeScript development/debugging experience with Nova? I'm currently using Vscode, and I'm wondering if I should have a look at Nova for this. (Nothing wrong with Vscode, I'm a bit into adventure)

Re: Nova by Panic

#285
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sketch has the same subscription model.

Sketch has a 'soft' way into making you constantly buy subscription. Plugins usually target only the latest released version of Sketch, so if you are dependent on plugins (and you ARE dependent on plugins if you use Sketch), then you either upgrade or eventually lose extended functionality. Because plugin manager will update plugins regardless of their compatibility with your current version.

I agree with most of your comment but as a constant Sketch user I'm NOT using any plugins, so that plugin dependency is a bit off IMO.

Re: Nova by Panic

#287

They call it “native”, but I don’t know, those screenshots look nothing native to me. Being “native” doesn’t just mean having a C++ codebase, it also means using the native OS UI frameworks.

It does look like it uses Cocoa. What are you seeing that doesn't look like Cocoa? Custom controls doesn't count; those can still be based on NSView and use other Cocoa controls in their implementation.

Re: Nova by Panic

#288
post #249

> We don't have built-in diff yet, but it's on our list! Fair enough - a good diff view has a lot of subtleties. One of the things i love about IntelliJ is having access to most of the normal editing tools in the diff view. If i'm reviewing my changes for a commit and i realise a method name could be improved, i can refactor-rename it right there. For some reason, possibly just keybindings, i can't use the broader se…

I haven't found a diff tool for macOS that is as good as WinMerge from fifteen years ago.

Kaleidoscope is fairly close but you still can't merge individual lines from a block of changes, and you can't make up for it with manual free-form editing of the text. Sometimes I want to perform the merge by copying and pasting segments myself. Sometimes I want to fix up indentation after merging.

Re: Nova by Panic

#289
post #141

Not that it's a bad thing but it looks like the extension API and architecture has lifted a fair amount from VS Code. I kind of wish they went all in on LSP and made their extension API via additional JSON RPC methods on top of the base protocol. Because that's what extension authors are using to share code between an extension/editor, LSP is the only thing somewhat consistent and the client surface area is tiny.

There is LSP support in Nova. I hope to see more plugins make use of it to bring more languages in the next few weeks.

Re: Nova by Panic

#290
post #261

> Here's a little editor story for fun. During beta we found some bugs in Apple's text layout engine that we just could not fix. Our solution? Writing our own text layout manager… from scratch. Not only did this fix the bugs, but it also boosted our editor's performance. We're not messing around! Seems like there's nobody better than Panic at doing this sort of thing. They're willing to push Apple's UI forward, but t…

To me, the quote and what you put after came as a big surprise - I was ready to nod in agreement as you recognize this as a sad story about the platform. The last time I was working on a text editor (KDE's Kate) and found a bug in the text layout engine it was written against (Qt's), I wrote a patch, submitted it upstream and it made everyone else's apps better, too. I can't imagine the world of hurt, discomfort and…

Thanks for working on Kate! That's my go-to editor.
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