56 ms·

Nova by Panic

• Brendinooo 6y ago
  > 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 they always do it in a way that feels Apple-y. Didn't they also pioneer a tab UI that Apple ended up adopting?
  • riordan 6y ago
    Indeed they did. I also fondly remember how wonderful the web development deployment workflow was in Coda. This was back before source control was ubiquitous and CI/CD was required for any real production environment. It was the cleanest way I'd seen to go from saving in your test editor and having a clear path to SFTP it to the server. I half recoil in horror and am still in awe of how considered their experience was.
    • joshcain 6y ago
      100%. Coda was especially useful if you weren't running your server stack on your local dev machine. Hit "Publish" and all your changed files are pushed up automatically. So much better than hunting through an FTP client every time you make a small edit.
    • pilsetnieks 6y ago
      > This was back before source control was ubiquitous Your memory may be playing tricks on you, it wasn't that long ago. Coda 1 had SVN support out of the box, and at the time SVN was already old and in decline, not to mention CVS and other lesser source control systems. By the time Coda 2 came out, git had won the DVCS battle, and was built into it. Now, granted, back then I wasn't very keen on version control either but it's not because it wasn't there, it's because I was young and inexperienced, and didn't know any better. Plus, those days the only common use for source control was actually, well, source control, unlike today. It was something you had to discipline yourself to use for no immediate benefit.
      • smoe 6y ago
        From my memory in the mid 2000 version control and automatized deploys weren't ubiquitous for the audience Coda mainly targeted: web site development. I started my career at around that time in a company using Python for web application development and everything was in SVN but already in the progress of being moved to git and while there wasn't a CI/CD server, all deploys were done running a single cli command. On the other hand for years to come I have seen e.g. people and agencies doing websites in Wordpress making changes directly in production. In that circles, which often included people with no heavy technical background like designers that learned some php/html/css Coda was quite a relevation I think.
  • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    The company itself would likely have become part of Apple if not for one bit of unlucky timing. Apple wanted to turn Panic's Mac OS 9 music player, Audion, into iTunes. https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/
    • Brendinooo 6y ago
      That's such a great story that's equally well-told. I think that story is what turned me on to Panic in general. Their blog was a must-read for me for years.
      • munificent 6y ago
        If you haven't seen it already, you will love this video by Cabel Sasser: https://youtu.be/8ZXWdR7RzV8 https://youtu.be/8ZXWdR7RzV8 Cabel, and Panic in general, are true heroes of mine.
        • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
          Oh, cool—check out the player that pops up if you hit "Play Now" on an episode!
    • dewey 6y ago
      There's also a really cool episode about that (and other things) on their official podcast: https://podcast.panic.com https://podcast.panic.com
    • forgotmypw17 6y ago
      Rest in peace, SoundJam. Best music player on Mac before Apple transformed it into the iTunes atrocity. SoundJam's hierarchical playlist has yet to be replicated by any other music player to my knowledge.
      • haroldp 6y ago
        Still upset.
  • mooman219 6y ago
    "Writing our own text layout manager… from scratch". I would be pessimistic of the magnitude of this statement. I do a significant amount of text engine work and I'm skeptical what they implied by this. The likely case is they glued together other solutions (Like HarfBuzz/FreeType/etc) and expose their own API on top of that. This is perfectly acceptable and even encouraged for accessibility reasons. It may be that CoreText isn't acceptable for their use case. What I think this would be misinterpreted as them writing the whole stack from scratch. For example, shaping is part of layout and it would be monumental if they wrote their own shaper given even HarfBuzz, DirectWrite, and CoreText do not have complete coverage yet. Additionally, BiDi + line breaking + shaping has bugs even in Chrome on some edge cases.
    • earthboundkid 6y ago
      For a text editor, why not just drop BiDi? I guess it sucks if you use a BiDi language for your comments, but there’s nothing per se wrong in making a solution that doesn’t work for everyone around the world if it works better for a subset of people.
      • monadic2 6y ago
        You'd also want BiDi for general-purpose "text" documents like markdown. There are many aspects of text rendering that aren't necessarily relevant here (think: word- and line-breaking) but directionality strikes me as a major feature.
        • csande17 6y ago
          For what it's worth, I fired up BBEdit (another popular commerical Mac code editor) and pasted in some Arabic text. It didn't behave remotely correctly -- the text shifted around bizarrely as I moved the intertion point. I think it's entirely plausible that Panic also shipped a text-layout system without full bidi support -- maybe that's why theirs is faster and less buggy on LTR text. The left-to-right language market (English, Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean...) is probably big enough to support a Mac app development studio on its own.
  • sho_hn 6y ago
    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 frustration of developing against a lib set I can't read source code of or improve.
    • ryantgtg 6y ago
      Thanks for working on Kate! That's my go-to editor.
    • ddevault 6y ago
      >I can't imagine the world of hurt, discomfort and frustration of developing against a lib set I can't read source code of or improve. Thank you. It boggles the mind that anyone who can write code would ever use a closed source operating system.
      • sumedh 6y ago
        Do the Windows based laptops have a similar touchpad like the Mac which just works, last time I checked they did not.
        • MacsHeadroom 6y ago
          At the same price point in the professional space, of course. Lenovo X series and System76 have solid touchpads- and have for years.
          • imwillofficial 6y ago
            “Solid” does not mean comparable. I have both high end dell and Lenovo laptops for work, and my Mac at home. My girlfriends MacBook Pro is far nicer to use despite being slower. Even for Windows.
          • 6y ago
  • p1necone 6y ago
    They entirely rewrote something because apples implementation wasn't good enough, that doesn't feel appley to me. "Appley" would be living with the limitations of apples implementation because apple knows best, and they tried their hardest to lock you out from any alternative option.
  • slmjkdbtl 6y ago
    Can you share what bug did you encounter with the apple text layout engine? I too have written simple text layout code for a text editor (dealing with wrapping, tabbing, cursors and all those things), and those are the most logically chaotic and ugly code I've ever written, turned out buggy and not maintainable, I'm interested to know how other people did it
    • Brendinooo 6y ago
      I pulled that quote from the article; it wasn't me developing for the Mac!
  • mhd 6y ago
    If I recall correctly, that's exactly what TextMate did years ago and what was one reason why it was considered to be so fast. Plus ca change in a proprietary world.
• threatofrain 6y ago
  It's strange that Nova would target web tech as their top priority, and not Swift. If you're Mac-exclusive, why not advertise top-class support for Apple ecosystem app development? Since Nova is prioritizing web workflows, VSC is the elephant in the room and a very deadly competitor. It's free and open source, it's available on Windows, MacOS, Linux, and it can also be ported to the web. And it's Insanely popular and very high quality. Meanwhile, all notable features Nova lists are default to VSC. One VSC feature that's been quite the remote lifesaver is shared sessions with voice chat.
  • asadlionpk 6y ago
    Going for Swift means competing with XCode, which wouldn't make sense as Swift is generally used along with the entire iOS/macOS Dev tools (Simulators, UI Builders, Device Manager etc). Not a wise thing to do.
    • paxys 6y ago
      It's the same for VSCode and JS/TS support though. Fighting against a fully featured, free, open-source and well-established product just on the basis of speed is going to be an uphill battle.
      • mkozlows 6y ago
        There is a big "ugh, Electron apps" contingent of Mac users. Or at least, there's a loud one, and I guess they figured it's also a big-enough one...
        • paxys 6y ago
          The vast majority of developers aren't hanging out on HN though. I'll wait till there are real benchmarks but I'd be very surprised if Nova is actually noticeably more performant than VS Code.
          • Nextgrid 6y ago
• LeoPanthera 6y ago
  $100 to buy, and then $50/year for updates. I'm surprised it has no support for bash, or any other kind of shell scripting.
• andrethegiant 6y ago
  The hover effect on the CTA is amazing.
  • egypturnash 6y ago
    Holy SHIT than's nice. The starfield background also moves based on your cursor position, dang.
    • cknoxrun 6y ago
      When you click download it moves to warp speed!
  • crazygringo 6y ago
    Thanks for telling me, I'd totally missed it by not hovering. That actually is amazing graphics. And the fact it's smooth-as-butter without even getting my laptop fan to turn on at all is even more impressive.
  • dylan604 6y ago
    Different worlds. I would have called it the download button. By chance are you in the marketing world?
    • izolate 6y ago
      Or just a frontend developer.
      • dylan604 6y ago
        Yikes! That's too close to the user for my liking. I'll stay in the shadows in the backend
  • jstsch 6y ago
    Indeed. Great performance too (much more CPU efficient on Safari than Chrome for some reason). Also: P3 colors all over :) the Nova logo burns my eyes nicely on the Ultrafine 5K's :) color(display-p3 1 .012 .29 / 1) learn something new every day. The site reminds me of early Panic work which was also pushing the web envelope forward in tiny attentive details.
• hbosch 6y ago
  I see some interesting things here. The bundled Git tools look really clean, I like the overall UI, it seems to already have some of my most used extensions ported over... but as someone who paid for and uses Sublime Text and finds it to be more than enough text editor for me, does anyone see something here that is worth switching for? At $99 it seems to be competing directly with ST3 ($80, fyi), not to mention the free editors VSCode and Atom. At that price am I getting much more than the satisfying feeling of supporting Panic?
  • ghshephard 6y ago
    Depends on what you are doing - and what you value. I have VSCode and SublimeText both running all day. VSCode competes with Nova, not as much SublimeText. If your priority is beautiful Mac apps, at perhaps the cost of the more mature plugin/code support from VSCode, then maybe Nova speaks to you. If you are just slamming through tons and tons of text files, and just need a really high-performance text file tool - SublimeText beats out both of them.
• rbanffy 6y ago
  I see a lot of real estate dedicated to things I don't care that much about when I'm writing code. I'm probably not the target audience for this. I'm much too happy with Emacs.
  • criddell 6y ago
    It looks pretty configurable. What parts weren't you able to hide?
    • rbanffy 6y ago
      I refer to their screenshot they show at the home. I was once fond of IDEs that had lots of information on-screen, but now I find it distracting.
• SirHound 6y ago
  I've been using the beta version of Nova for a few weeks now and I've almost used my trial period for the 1.0. As a TypeScript developer, if someone made me choose between paying $99 for the actually-free VS Code, or buy Nova, I would by VS Code without hesitation. Before it began getting long in the tooth I was a big Coda fan. On the whole I like VS Code but I do suffer the occasional runaway process so I am open-minded to a new editor from Panic. Nova is faster than VS Code, but barely. I like the default rainbow indentation, though I'm sure there's a VSC plugin for that. The contextual spell-checking is excellent and I know it's a better experience than any VSC plugin. But this thing can't even auto-format a comment block. You can't set format-specific options (so for instance no line-wrapping on only Markdown/MDX files). The default editing experience is lightweight, and that's a good thing. But the plugin story is dire. Plugins like ESLint and Prettier crash constantly, requiring an app restart. Prettier has a format-on-save behaviour that seems to format after save on some file types. Typescript cmd-click definitions are broken, cmd-click import filepaths are broken. It's not a bad effort but it speaks to how much ground they have to cover to get within the same galaxy as the VS Code experience. I genuinely think it'll be years before they can charge for this with a straight face.
  • hoistbypetard 6y ago
    If I were them, I think I would try really hard to build a low-effort conversion process for VSCode extensions. If they can do that in such a way that the top XXX VSCode extensions could be used with a good experience in Nova and fix the couple of non-plugin gripes you mention, I think they've probably bested the VSCode experience for enough people to make it profitable. I am not sure if I am pessimistic enough to call that "years" once they've got that migration path planned. If they're not planning something like it, though, then I think I agree with you.
    • jamil7 6y ago
      I was impressed with the way that oni2 did this, any vscode extension is a valid oni2 extension. I ended up sticking with neovim for the time being but I feel something similar could work for nova’s benefit.
    • 6y ago
• slater 6y ago
  Tries to connect to appcenter.ms at launch... is that just for extensions?
  • cglong 6y ago
    App Center is a beta distribution platform. I guess the prod version still includes its library.
    • saagarjha 6y ago
      App Center does crash reporting as well.
  • kitx 6y ago
    Crash reporting, formerly Hockey App but when acquired by Microsoft it became part of App Center.
• umvi 6y ago
  Panic seems like it would be a cool company to work for. I'm not a Mac guy, so this particular product doesn't interest me, but I've had my eye on the Playdate.
  • compscistd 6y ago
    They tease it through the text editor environments screenshotted in the Nova page!
• brainless 6y ago
  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.
  • dylan604 6y ago
    It can also be a great motivator. The new app has a lot to do and knows where to make improvements. The existing app has then one up them to stay relevant. Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand used to do this with each release. Now you see it between platforms like FB/Insta/TikTok/Twitter etc.
  • madeofpalk 6y ago
    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.
    • ehutch79 6y ago
      Agreed. It still feels very much like it's focused on something like wordpress with the sync features so prominent.
    • rimliu 6y ago
      > These days, web development got both more mature, > complicated, and simpler "Mature" and "simpler" do not belong there.
• hartator 6y ago
  > If you like it, keep it forever What year is this. :)
• prezjordan 6y ago
  Looks like Language Server Protocol [0] support is on their list of features - awesome. Will definitely check out, I have a soft spot for native. [0] https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/ https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/
  • johnghanks 6y ago
    kinda wild that something so important is buried in a huge list of other things. LSP is critical for _anything_ that even _wants_ to compete with VSC.
    • runawaybottle 6y ago
      If they did that part before their launch, they’d have a real launch. Basically we are all going to be waiting for the ‘And now Nova can import all your VSCode stuff seamlessly’.
  • dvcrn 6y ago
    wow you're right, it looks like LSP support is built in. It's just not individually configurable and needs an extension to be fully usable, apparently
• Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
  I really like their pricing structure here. If you want updates forever, it's functionally a subscription (which makes sense - constant updates require constant dev work). The key difference is that if you stop paying, you keep everything you've paid for previously (the app and all past updates). That's a _great_ way to do a subscription.
  • firloop 6y ago
    Sketch has the same subscription model.
    • mittermayr 6y ago
      Main issue is that ongoing changes in the environment will eventually render whichever Sketch version you are using possibly unusable. I am on a version (that isn't too far out I think) that now can't save anymore on Mac (I suspect the file system/access changes they introduced). So where I previously had a version of Sketch I was totally happy with feature-wise, I now have one that I can't really use anymore. Would've been nice if there was a separation of "free fundamental" updates and paid-for feature updates.
      • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        That’s Apple’s fault. You could, say, dedicate an old Mac to Sketch and keep it on an old OS, and the setup would work basically forever. I do think Apple could do much better with backwards-compatibility. They don’t need to go Microsoft’s extreme. I thought they’d found a good compromise for years on the Mac, but it’s tipped much too far towards just breaking everything lately.
    • Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      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.
• avolcano 6y ago
  It's so hard to target web development with how fragmented the ecosystem is, so it's nice to see they have a lot of extensions already. That said, because of how fragmented the ecosystem is, it is difficult for me to jump in. For example, my main side project right now is a Vue app that uses SCSS syntax in components, which the Vue extension for Nova does not yet support. This might sound like a small detail, but it's a total dealbreaker - and while, if this was a totally open source editor, I might be interested in contributing to the extension, I can't say that I'm interested in paying $100 and then helping out. It's a very difficult chicken and egg situation.
• esaym 6y ago
  Man I'm still vim only. I've tried these giant IDE apps, but just can't wing it.
  • yesimahuman 6y ago
    You're getting downvoted but a legitimate question is if vim binding support is coming or is even possible in the extension framework? VS Code vim binding support is very buggy and breaks frequently, but otherwise works well. I could see myself switching if vim bindings were better on this because I think the sweet spot of editors is a nice GUI/project tree/etc. with vim bindings.
    • curiouser2 6y ago
      It's worth checking out if the Neovim VScode plugin[1] works for your workflow. It's not as mature, but was much smoother when I tested it out. I'm not able to make the change until they implement a "toggle vim mode" command available... but once they do I'll jump. Also check out Onivim[2] 1: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetliakov.vscode-neovim https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetlia... 2: https://www.onivim.io/ https://www.onivim.io/
      • yesimahuman 6y ago
        Interesting, thanks for the links! I use a pretty shallow set of vim features so even if it's minimal but more stable that would be a big boost.
    • Gaelan 6y ago
      > even possible in the extension framework quickly looking at the docs, I see no support for keybinds without modifier keys or changing cursor shape, both of which are essential for decent vim emulation.
    • cassepipe 6y ago
      I agree. I like how light Vim is and its simple looks but I can understand why people may not like it. What I can't understand is how one can do without modal editing :D
• worldmerge 6y ago
  Edit: I think my performance with the background is a super niche one. It runs fine in Microsoft Edge on my Windows install on a Macbook Pro 2015, but not on Chrome. The animation is really cool especially that onscroll effect!
  • simonklitj 6y ago
    Buttery smooth on MBPRO 2019, Safari.
  • dylan604 6y ago
    Maybe you have a spec of dust under one of the keys on your keyboard that is causing the site to think you are trying to do something?
    • worldmerge 6y ago
      I don't think so. I've never had any site, even ones that use complex animations like Stripe's site bring my machine to a crawl like this. I'm pretty confident it's the Canvas animation causing this. I disabled JS and the site runs fine.
      • dylan604 6y ago
        Sorry, I was just making fun of the specific model laptop. I'm on a 2016 model, and my s,d,f,t, and left-cmd key caps all come off while typing. I would love to see how much it is going to cost me to have fixed, but I've had to live with it since all of the Mac Stores in my area were closed. Now, I'm just used to it even though my WPM has taken a major hit.
  • andrethegiant 6y ago
    Smooth on my 2015 MBP in Safari.
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    Smooth in my 2011 MacBook Air.
• perardi 6y ago
  I love native Mac apps, I love Panic…but I’m not sure what this gets me over Visual Studio Code, besides a Preferences pane that isn’t inscrutable. I’m not sure there’s enough of a market on the Mac for another commercial code editor, as we already have BBEdit for hard-core text wrangling. (And obviously all the open-source options.)
  • criddell 6y ago
    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.
    • perardi 6y ago
      Oh I get that’s the market, I just hope said market is large enough for them.
      • ghego1 6y ago
        Considering that for iOS/mac/apple platforms devs will probably chose xcode, and given the premium one has to pay for mac computers these days (justified or not, I'm not saying either), I fear the answer is no. Most devs that do _not_ make native apple apps (e.g. web devs) do not need a Mac, so the market of devs that do not use xcode, that prefer a Mac and that are willing to pay for a proprietary solution, over other proprietary solutions, is likely not that big.
        • criddell 6y ago
          There are still a lot of web developers who choose a Mac even if they don't need one. Nice hardware running unix with a decent UI is worth a premium price to lots of people. I think you underestimate how many developers are willing to pay for their tools proprietary or not. We know better than most how difficult it is to make software and so I think as a group are more willing to support each other financially.
      • IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
• mortenjorck 6y ago
  Great to see the up-to-date pricing model find another high-profile adopter. Subscriptions for non-service-based apps are terrible for customers, while major version upgrades make it hard for developers to plan around a steady revenue stream. Up-to-date models, as Panic has implemented with Nova, offer the best of both, with perpetual licenses for customers and a regular income stream for developers.
• pier25 6y ago
  Looks like a more beautiful version of Sublime but macOS exclusive.
• vosper 6y ago
  > It's new, hyper-fast, and flexible, with all the features you want: [...] a Minimap Do people actually find the Minimap useful for coding? If so, how? And why is it better/different than just a scrollbar, or searching? I've always thought of Minimaps as a thing that seems like it should be adding something to the interface, but actually isn't at all. Seems like pointless eye-candy, to me. What am I missing?
  • kevsim 6y ago
    I scan it for different colors in VS Code quite often. Oops, something red down there. Or quick scan to see where the various colored things that represent git diffs are (red for deleted, green for new, blue for changed). But as you said, can get the same in the scroll bar.
  • Brendinooo 6y ago
    I use my minimap sometimes. Some people are just more visual. Like, if I have a big file that has a class somewhere, and I know I took a bunch of notes on it, I can scan the minimap for the big block of green comment text, and click that section to jump directly to it. Regardless, I'm not really short on horizontal space in a world where monitors are huge and 80-character lines are still the norm, so it costs little to keep it there.
    • dmit 6y ago
      This is it. In my head the code file I'm working on is closer to a (geographic) map than to a Table of Contents in a book. There are large islands and small ones, some of the small ones form archipelagos (like grouped up constant definitions at the top). The minimap is good at conveying the "shape" and relative size of these code sections at a glance.
  • tleb_ 6y ago
    I feel the same about minimaps. In the same extract they list "editor overscroll"; the feature set must be limited to list that on the landing page. > It's new, hyper-fast, and flexible, with all the features you want: smart autocomplete, multiple cursors, a Minimap, editor overscroll, tag pairs and brackets, and way, way more.
• josefresco 6y ago
  On another note, how was Panic able to get a registered trademark for "Nova"?
  • CydeWeys 6y ago
    Who else in this space do you think should have blocked it?
  • mtmail 6y ago
    Serial number 88490818 at https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-application-process/search-trademark-database https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-application-process/search-... "IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Downloadable web site development software; Downloadable computer software development tools" I guess the trademark it's very specific and not in conflict with let's say a model of a car. But also other companies can challenge the trademark later if they deem it in conflict with theirs.
• tpush 6y ago
  Finally a Mac-native code editor with Language Server Protocol support! Been clamoring this for a while.
  • dorian-graph 6y ago
    > Language Server Protocol This was the first thing I looked for on their feature page!
• jumelles 6y ago
  Panic is almost better at clean Apple-esque design than Apple themselves.
• morelikeborelax 6y ago
  Been waiting for this for some time as a previous Coda 2 user for a while. Looks good.
• aduitsis 6y ago
  Delighted that it includes Perl support! (full list: 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)
  • chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    Well, it has an extension system, so it can have anything somebody makes an extension for. There's already surprisingly good Elixir support.
    • bigbassroller 6y ago
      Good to hear because that would be a deal breaker for me.
• spiralganglion 6y ago
  I see a lot of folks here comparing this to VS Code and asking "Why would I use this instead?" — I am exactly on the opposite side of that equation. Why would I use VS Code when I can use this? I've been using Atom for most of the decade (plus a bit of Sublime, and TextMate before), and I've loved being able to hack it to look and feel exactly how I want. There's a ton of custom CSS in my setup. Now, Atom is slow. That is a daily frustration for me. The latency on every keypress is grating. I've stripped out every package I can, and that custom CSS I mentioned is mostly hiding things I don't want to see. But still, the lag! I feel it all around. I tried switching to VS Code, but it was appreciably worse for me. I couldn't configure it to look as nice as Atom (and it had the unshakable feeling that it was made by folks from the Windows school of design — plenty of weird [to me] spacing and typographic choices). It also didn't feel any faster. So why does Nova appeal to me? Well, Atom is no longer supported, so I'm going to have to switch to something anyway. Nova doesn't look as minimal as I'd like, but I can live with that — at least it looks nice! And it's a native app, so it should (in theory) be buttery smooth. When it comes to a tool I will spend all day, every day in, $50/year is peanuts. This is my working life. It's worth spending a relatively tiny bit of money to have something nice instead of something good enough. Price is a non-issue for me. As for extensions... I don't use any. I stripped them all out to try to make Atom faster. So now I get to discover what extensions are available, without being left longing for something I had to give up. Maybe I'll build an extension for myself. This is a new frontier for me. So we'll see. I tried Coda, didn't like it. I love Transmit, though. So if this tool lives up to its promises, and succeeds on its own terms, I'll be thrilled. For the folks happy with VS Code... that's fantastic. I'm glad you have found a tool you like. For folks like me, for whom VS Code just felt off, this seems like a great option.
  • FullyFunctional 6y ago
    I change platforms many times a day (macOS, Linux, occasionally Windows) and VS Code being cross platform is essential for my use of it. Being Mac-only is a complete deal-breaker.
    • Brendinooo 6y ago
      You are definitely not Panic's target audience.
• awill 6y ago
  I'm mixed on these Mac only apps. While they do look/feel better than cross platform apps, I really, really love being able to use SublimeText on my work laptop (Mac), and my personal desktop (Linux).
• rglover 6y ago
  That call to action hover made me grin from ear to ear :)
• markstos 6y ago
  Watch out BBEdit!
• etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
  I don't mean to complain about Nova, but I don't think being platform-specific is something to be applauded (in itself). It's like making your webapp only for Chrome -- that's not a feature, per-se.
  • johnghanks 6y ago
    Yeah it's like celebrating shooting yourself in the foot.
  • liquidise 6y ago
    Platform specificity typically comes with native performance and, in the case of Panic, a UI that closely follows OSX conventions. For some (many?) these are meaningful value-adds.
    • etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
      But isn't it better to be native on multiple platforms? Like Chrome itself, or Photoshop, or Sublime Text, and many others?
      • rimliu 6y ago
        You are never native on multiple platforms. You are always alien on all of them. Unless you have separate code base for each.
• mamcx 6y ago
  (In case that somebody of panic read this) For different reasons, I use VS Code (pretty, JS stuff), Sublime (fast), IntelliJ(rust) and a SQL Tool(sql!) at the same time. I like the idea of coda of being more IDEish with transmission and ssh built-in, but one thing that no editor I have use is good at, is to see logs, sql and CVS/JSON data. In the case of CVS/json, I kill for a way to turn it in auto-datatable with built-in search (do a lot of tabular data manipulation). So, then after use sublime to load stuff, need ALSO to open excel OR numbers (which one open this CVS file is a gamble) do the edits there, then go back....
  • cosmotic 6y ago
    IDEA has excellent log support, SQL, and CVS/JSON support including loading as a table with search.
    • mamcx 6y ago
      I just checked and is true. I need to test for a while how good. Thanks!
• johnghanks 6y ago
  With all due respect you gotta come out with a grand slam to get me off of VSCode. This ain't it.
  • The_rationalist 6y ago
    Ever tried intellij? It's objectively order of magnitude smarter
• Hoasi 6y ago
  Long-awaited. Enjoyed Coda for a long time, then switched to Atom. It looks like a polished Atom version, and Nova is likely going to replace Atom for me.
  • czbond 6y ago
    Why? (asking curiously). I used some version of Jetbrains, then Goland, then Atom.
    • Hoasi 6y ago
      Well, for one, many believe Atom development stalled/is slowly dying.
• cordite 6y ago
  That “and so much more” block on the end is such an SEO grab.. you can open RSA and ECDSA keys? So can vi.
• hashbig 6y ago
  I just don't understand why all this work didn't go into making an iOS text editor. Why did they choose Mac OS? It's the most saturated platform when it comes to editors. Meanwhile, the only thing that keeps me from using my iPad Pro full-time is the lack of a serious text editor and terminal.
  • deergomoo 6y ago
    Probably because for most of the use cases, you couldn’t actually do anything with the code you write without involving another machine. It’s not like you can spin up a node server. I too would like to use my iPad Pro for work stuff, but I would say the thing standing in my way is Apple.
• racedude 6y ago
  I won't be touching it until VIM support is a thing, it feels weird to see or use an editor without support for basic VIM keybindings...
  • chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    It's not a matter of keybindings -- Nova is a modeless editor, and Vim is a modal one, so you need to have an entirely different interaction model. Not every editor's extension system is capable of that. (AFAIK, Vim itself isn't capable of changing interaction models -- while I've seen "Emacs keybindings" for Vim, they don't make Vim into a modeless editor.)
• yepthatsreality 6y ago
  Test your site out on Firefox, then we'll talk.
  • ridiculous_fish 6y ago
    The site seems to work fine for me on Firefox 80, both Mac and Windows - what problem do you see?
    • yepthatsreality 6y ago
      All the text was squished into the bottom. Once you scrolled up it would pull the text from this giant text-blob. It seems to have been fixed since.
• AJRF 6y ago
  I am so confused why they didn't put efforts into making this an iPad app. There is a market for something like this that developers are crying out for, but on mac why would anyone use this over VSCode (and pay $99 for the privilege?)
  • chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    Panic has an iOS code editor -- right now it's built off Coda, Nova's predecessor, but I'm sure if there's market demand for it, an iOS version will be coming. Having said that, a lot of software developers -- including Panic -- have not had great experiences trying to sell development tools on iOS. It feels like there should be a big enough market for this, but it's unclear there's actually much of one. If Apple brought Xcode to iPadOS it would likely require changes to the OS to support that kind of development toolchain, and that would make it easier for other companies to bring their tools, both commercial and free. But I half-suspect the official Apple answer to "when are you gonna let us develop on iPadOS" will be "may we interest you in this Apple Silicon-based, touch screen MacBook that natively runs iPad apps."
  • starik36 6y ago
    Does anyone seriously want to develop on the iPad?
    • reaperducer 6y ago
      Not all the time every day, but Panic’s Coda on an iPad saved my bacon once when I was on vacation.
    • sixstringtheory 6y ago
      I am currently on a long path towards a central machine that I can remotely access from an iPad (and a laptop). In addition to connecting via ssh or screen sharing, I'd love to be able to clone git repositories on the iPad and edit locally. If I could Handoff something like a shallow clone of a git repo and its working index between iPad and mac, I'd be in love.
    • scarlac 6y ago
• unicornfinder 6y ago
  Panic is one of those developers that makes me genuinely jealous of Mac users
  • hu3 6y ago
    We feel the same about Windows users and gaming. Take a glance at https://old.reddit.com/r/macgaming/ https://old.reddit.com/r/macgaming/
• stephc_int13 6y ago
  They are cutting themselves from so many users... I don't think that macOS has anything special today.
  • dewey 6y ago
    They are a Mac developer shop from day one and that's what they are good at. If they'd start building some hybrid cross-platform solution they'd compete with VSCode and all the other free or cheap editors. Doesn't make sense at all.
  • rimliu 6y ago
    I think they were making Mac software back in the days when anything Apple was a true niche. They should be fine.
• vscTA 6y ago
  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.
  • zapzupnz 6y ago
    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.
• r053bud 6y ago
  Maybe I'm missing it, but also no support for breakpoints or debugging?
• spdustin 6y ago
  The warp speed when you mouse over the "Download Nova for Free" CTA is gorgeous. It's over the top, but it's gorgeous. On Safari, anyway; on Chrome, it's very jittery.
• zobzu 6y ago
  I'm just happy to see Panic still exist. I loved their FTP client and most of their macOS "classic" software. Apparently the FTP client still exists actually :)
• michaelmarion 6y ago
  I’m going to be that guy: I would kill for a Java IDE that looked like this.
  • coryfklein 6y ago
    That's the first thing I looked for - Java support. Looks like it's not available... for now?
    • michaelmarion 6y ago
      Seems like Panic is billing Nova as a text editor only—not necessarily an IDE. They’d have to add in functionality for a whole host of other things to make that a reality, including compilation, build, debugging, and so on. I doubt all of that can be done with their build scripts and extension framework alone, but, hey—I’ve been wrong before. The state of the IDE landscape on Mac amazes me. It seems like there a $#!*-ton of Java/C++ developers using standard-issue MacBooks at Big Corp, Inc. who are staring at ugly IntelliJ windows for eight hours a day. If there was a native-feeling, good-looking IDE for the Mac I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t print money. (Or if XCode ever decided to branch out beyond honest-to-goodness support for things other than Objective-C and Swift...)
      • AMC11 6y ago
        Is IntelliJ generally considered ugly?
        • brailsafe 6y ago
          IntelliJ is definitely ugly, but not quite as bad as NetBeans or Eclipse. It's really powerful though and I prefer WebStorm and PyCharm for a number of things. I think it's because of how complex the interface is, combined with looking like a cross-platform app. It feels to me like I'm using a Windows app that happens to run on mac.
• 0898 6y ago
  What happened to that little handheld console with a crankshaft Panic was making?
  • dbt00 6y ago
    Looks like it's still chugging along. There was a big twitter update a month ago with some in-progress third party projects from developer preview units that shipped.
• thamer 6y ago
  Looks pretty, but is there really no Vim extension? I couldn't find one on the Extensions page. This is a deal-breaker for me, I can't use an editor or IDE without Vim bindings, this would kill my productivity. Is one planned, maybe?
  • bkanber 6y ago
    This was the first thing I looked for too. Perhaps one is planned or perhaps they're counting on the community to write one using their API. TBH the only feature I truly use JetBrains for is their Cmd+Click to jump to definition, otherwise I'd be happy sticking with tmux+vim as IDE (as I did for about a decade).
    • mmm_grayons 6y ago
      Wouldn't g ctrl+] work for jumping to definition with a tags file?
      • sushisource 6y ago
        Not to speak for parent comment, but the reason I use vim plugins in JetBrains IDEs is to have all that shit "just work". Yeah, you can setup stuff to autogen tags, but it's not always reliable. If you care about other IDE features (I do) then the list of crap you need to do to get vim/nvim to work properly piles up endlessly. I'll take the IDE with it's nice appearance and features and slap the keybindings in any day over the reverse.
        • OOPMan 6y ago
          Indeed. I suspect the reason a lot of people don't seem to refactor their code is because they would have to do so semi-manually with whatever hip-but-feature-bereft editor they've sworn allegiance to.
      • bkanber 6y ago
        ctags (which is the way I used to do it) was always sort of hit or miss for me. JetBrains OTOH just works. Apparently there's a new way of doing it though, which I should look into.
• TimothyBJacobs 6y ago
  It looks great, but I really can't see myself ditching JetBrains. The refactoring tools alone make it a better solution for me.
• czbond 6y ago
  Adding support for Go(lang)?
• ryanSrich 6y ago
  Ah yes. Nova, the team that sent me the most pompous “rejection email” I’ve ever had for a product. “You weren’t randomly chosen for the Nova Private beta” “After six months, our Nova Private Beta is gradually drawing to a close. Unfortunately, we had far more people apply to test than we could reasonably accept as testers. We’re sorry to report that you were not randomly chosen for testing this time.”
  • TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
    How is that pompous? Seems rather straight forward to be honest.
    • ryanSrich 6y ago
      A rejection email for a product that's positioned like I just got turned down for a job? How is that not pompous?
      • runawaybottle 6y ago
        Lol. I don’t know why you got downvoted, that email is definitely from their candidate rejection letter template. “We have chosen to go with another beta tester that better aligns with our needs at this time”.
      • matchbok 6y ago
        It doesn't sound like that, and it isn't.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• vkoskiv 6y ago
  Lovely looking editor with a bunch of features, but they seemingly forgot to include support for something as ubiquitous as C? That's kind of a weird omission. I'll be following the development of this, but for now I'm not playing with it much further.
  • mmm_grayons 6y ago
    Yeah, I was confused by that; I believe there's LSP support, but no C/C++ support is a deal-breaker for a lot of people.
• Nextgrid 6y ago
  Just downloaded, looks and feels great but I don’t see any way to configure a Python project? It does per-file syntax highlighting but no cross-file symbol resolution and I don’t see any place where I can configure the location of my virtualenv so it can find all the libraries. Am I just being stupid or is there no proper Python support yet?
• reaperducer 6y ago
  Eager to try this out. Coda was far ahead of its time, but became dated as others caught up. Hopefully Nova is just as far ahead. Moreover, I'm getting tired of VS Code's slowness and quirks, so switching back to something from Panic would be great. If it crashes less often than VS Code, it's half way there. For those who don't know, Panic is well known for decades for making incredibly high-quality software. It's not a big, flashy SV startup, but a small team in Portland that emphasizes quality over quantity. Also important: Panic takes purchase orders, which is the only way the company I work for will buy software. A multi-billion dollar company where only the C-levels have credit cards. Panic bent over backwards to sell us several products.
  • pier25 6y ago
    > Coda was far ahead of its time Other than the Cocoa UI what feature did it introduce? > Panic is well known for decades for making incredibly high-quality software They make great UIs that for sure, but other than that I wouldn't consider them a great software company. Transmit 4 is one of the slowest FTP clients I've ever used. [0] Coda 1 and 2 were extremely slow. I remember years ago a coworker had to wait a minute or more to be able to open a medium sized file while Sublime chew it in a second or two. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMACGW7zOcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMACGW7zOcY
    • reaperducer 6y ago
      Transmit 4? That came out over a decade ago. Why would you use that as a basis of comparison? Transmit 5 has been out for more than three years.
      • pier25 6y ago
        Transmit 4 lasted in the market for 7 years. If that is not representative of a company, I don't know what it is.
  • paul_f 6y ago
    Am a big fan of the clean, simple UI of Coda. And the SCP built-in for web development. Would never consider VS Code or Atom. If I did make a change and not migrate to Nova, I would consider Brackets. It looks to be the most Coda-like. Any thoughts on that?
• johnknowles 6y ago
  Anyone else tired of this underlying form for IDEs? I get why the side toolbars make sense, from a space efficiency perspective, but the amount of information to take in is always overwhelming from a zoomed-out perspective, considering the whole app window. Why do app designers continue to force us to select what to focus on amongst a sea of visual stimulation? Make it hidden by default, and appear only when we want it!
  • runawaybottle 6y ago
    IDE devs can copy a thing or two from all the distraction free writing tools (which have gone too far), balance is key.
  • arvinsim 6y ago
    Good IDEs allow you to change the layout or hide unnecessary parts.
• rdevnull 6y ago
  Just WOW!! just bought my copy..great idea to offer a discount for Coda 2 owners. Is just awesome!
• biztos 6y ago
  I'll definitely give it a try but it seems very web-dev-centric at first glance. There is a "preliminary alpha" Go extension for example, but there is first-class support for... FTP. It took me a few minutes to notice the magical sometimes-visible "download" link but now I have the trial, and I hope it's as useful as it is pretty!
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    You couldn’t find the download link? The one that everyone else in this discussion is raving about? It’s the huge blue button right in the middle of the page that reads “Download Nova for free.” They couldn’t make it more obvious unless the forced an auto-download.
    • biztos 6y ago
      Indeed somehow I missed that. Scanned right past it, even though I took a minute to play with the stars. I guess I registered the "buy now" link and then went right into the content section. Clearly my bad, looking at it now obviously it's a prominent call to action.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Impossible 6y ago
  It'd be awesome if they give it first class Playdate support
• stakkur 6y ago
  Is this not just Coda reworked?
  • rimliu 6y ago
    who cares?
• slmjkdbtl 6y ago
  Panic makes the juiciest GUI apps and have the strongest presentations, but I can't stand an editor that isn't 60fps scrolling, feels like Atom all over again (downloaded VS Code just to make sure it's not my computer that's slow, and VS Code did give me smooth scrolling, curious about why a browser based editor is smoother than a native mac one) ps. just found out they're the devs of Untitled Goose Game and Firewatch nice nice
  • archgoon 6y ago
    > curious about why a browser based editor is smoother than a native mac one Turns out that browsers have gotten somewhat good at rendering formatted text ;). But yes, a deep dive into the exact rendering pipelines would be quite interesting.
  • ihuman 6y ago
    They're the publisher of Untitled Goose Game and Firewatch, not the developer.
    • slmjkdbtl 6y ago
      thanks for the info!
  • johnzim 6y ago
    They’re the publishers of those games not devs (though they’re great)
    • slmjkdbtl 6y ago
      oh thanks for the info, yeah i was shocked when thought they actually made this
• throwaway7281 6y ago
  The tools you use will shape the things you build. That's why I use vim because I long for simplicity, clarity, reduction.
• twic 6y ago
  > 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 set of refactorings (extract, inline, etc) in the diff, and i wish i could use those too. The diff could potentially be my main interface for programming.
  • sjwright 6y ago
    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.
    • sixstringtheory 6y ago
      Heavy Kaleidoscope user here. You can definitely edit the text in the merge column, I've had to do it many times for exactly what you're describing!
      • sjwright 6y ago
        Really, how? I've got a Kaleidoscope merge open right now and I can't edit text. Is there a mode I need to toggle or a button I need to press? I've looked through all the menu items, preferences, all of the toggle switches in the UI, and searched the documentation. I'm running version 2.3.2.
        • sjwright 6y ago
          Pressed on by your certitude, I tried googling it again and yep, you definitely can't. https://twitter.com/kaleidoscopeapp/status/341930870900416512 https://twitter.com/kaleidoscopeapp/status/34193087090041651... (But you can when dealing with merge conflicts? Wow. Quite remarkable for a seemingly basic bit of core functionality to stay humming on the to-do list for seven years, despite the very same feature already implemented in a nearly identical context!)
• LeoNatan25 6y ago
  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.
  • zapzupnz 6y ago
    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.
    • LeoNatan25 6y ago
      Even if NSView-backed, custom views that replace basic functionality aren’t really native to me. Here, the entire window frame, all widgets, etc. are not native. It looks, to me, like an Electron or RN “app”.
      • zapzupnz 6y ago
        > Custom views that replace basic functionality The only custom controls I see are the tabs, tab bar, and a few modals (like when opening a new tab), and a handful of buttons and segmented controls in the sidebar. Everything else is native, unmodified Cocoa controls: NSWindow, preference window and its contained controls, the sidebar, etc. I actually am a bit curious about the decision to have those NSButtons with custom backgrounds … they don't really look right both on Catalina or Big Sur. Native-looking NSButtons are used everywhere else, though. > the entire window frame About the only thing that looks unusual here is the custom buttons at the top-left with the diagonal lines. No more custom than Xcode, iTunes. If the problem is that the toolbar seems to be in the titlebar, that's been an accepted, Cocoa-supported window style for a long time — and much more prevalent in Big Sur. It has the correct translucency behaviour in Big Sur. Maybe one day they'll update it to use Big Sur-style full-height sidebars. > It looks, to me, like an Electron or RN "app" Electron and React Native apps wish they could integrate with Cocoa as well as this. Those never look like anything more than a plain NSWindow with a plain, thin titlebar with a web view inside — or worse, not even an NSWindow but one painted with custom controls.
• fnord77 6y ago
  looks nice but highish CPU usage just typing some random sentences at my slowish wpm... enough to set off the fans on my 2015 mbp. Other editors I use (intellij idea, vs code) don't do this. Hopefully it is something minor.
• thebouv 6y ago
  I love Panic. Transmit was awesome when I needed a great sftp client gui. But I don't need it anymore. Coda was baller. But I don't need it anymore. I think I'll go ahead and buy Nova to check it out and support them. But VS Code does everything I need and I have no complaints about it. Plus I can use the same editor on my Mac and on my Linux desktops. I find it interesting they're getting into this space, but more power to them.
• bovermyer 6y ago
  I'm most interested in this as a competitor to Sublime Text, and also PHPStorm.
• jpzisme 6y ago
  I'm a vim guy, but this looks very well done. Good job, y'all
• sahoo 6y ago
  Will this be available in iPad. What does arm chips in mac means for iPad.
• can16358p 6y ago
  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)
  • scarlac 6y ago
    I will be giving it a go for the next few days to see if it'll work for React Native development.
    • can16358p 6y ago
      I'd love to know how it goes and any significant upsides/downsides.
      • scarlac 6y ago
        Ok, so some feedback: I'm sad to report I stopped testing already. For my particular job I tend to debug and work with large files, especially JSON. A lot of debugging apps and looking through large crash logs, then looking at application states. This is probably not typical, but it's crucial to me. The transition is made hard because of the odd default key mappings (they hotkey editor is very difficult to use. I went back and forward and couldn't understand why my mappings weren't working only to find that it was due to having to use the hotkey editor in a specific way). I really think a good keymapping is the first hurdle people have to overcome, so shipping it with an hotkey extension for Sublime, VSCode, etc. would be a big win off the line. The autocomplete and jump to definition seemed to work well. I had a hard time figuring out if "Find references" were working. It kept telling me to go to some obscure tab or place somewhere but since it's all symbols, I don't know where to actually go. VSCode is easy by comparison - a "peek" window shows up prioritized references. However, Nova is a no-go for me because it simply stalls when opening a >2 MB JSON files. Forget about trying to search-replace - it's simply too slow. In defense of Nova, Sublime also can't deal with it. My impression going away from Nova is: It's like Xcode and VSCode had a baby. Perhaps with time it'll improve in performance and be fine tuned to a point where I can use it daily - but given it's primarily paid (not "free with nag screen" like sublime), I can't review it any time soon again.
• xenihn 6y ago
  I will pay for this if I can use it to run Swift code without saving to a file, in the same way that Textmate does.
• chrysoprace 6y ago
  It's all well and good to strive to take advantage of a native OS but it should not come at the cost of platform exclusivity.
  • marckohlbrugge 6y ago
    Why not? Most developers seem to work on one platform anyway. It’s time someone built a good macOS-native editor. There are already plenty of non-native solutions out there.
    • chrysoprace 6y ago
      Platform exclusivity should be a thing of the past, especially as technology to make cross-platform apps has become so accessible. For me the app becomes practically useless as soon as it's only on one platform as I frequently switch between Linux and Windows. The developers in my team work on a mix of MacOS, Linux, and Windows. In the face of VSC, a MacOS-exclusive app simply does not compete.
      • pseudalopex 6y ago
        They already had a similar app. They probably know something about the target market.
      • rimliu 6y ago
        And for me any app that becomes cross-platform loses some appeal. I do not swtich paltform when writing some code, so all those compromises and trade-offs made in the name of being cross-platform are a loss to me, not some gain.
• samatman 6y ago
  Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to answer the only question I have, which is how they handle syntax highlighting. I'm going to assume they support .tmLanguage, because it's the de facto standard. Do they support .sublime-syntax? If they do, I'm interested, if not, well, I'd circle back if they add it, but lack of support is a deal-breaker for my use case. More generally, it's a great splash page, but it doesn't appear to link into extensive documentation, and that's not a good sign. Should be right there on the top bar. This is a tool I'd spend hours of my life a day in, and every text editor in existence is an immensely complex beast which requires good documentation.
• KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
  While this editor looks very nice I'm still confused on why I would use this over sublimetext or vscode. It doesn't try to contrast at all just lists a bunch of features that I already have in other editors.
  • YetAnotherNick 6y ago
    They answered that in the first line of the page > native Mac code editor Looks much more native and likely faster than electron based editors like vscode or Atom.
    • KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
      I use sublime though which is native as well.
      • pseudalopex 6y ago
        Native code but cross platform UI. It doesn't support Services[1], for example. [1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/extensions/services/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
• jonny383 6y ago
  No vim key bindings. No extension for vim key bindings :(
• hultner 6y ago
  Is there a vim-mode? If so, is it any good? I couldn’t see any mention of it on the webpage or in the extensions. I used to love Coda back in the late 00s, especially for its live CSS mode (not so revolutionary today with this built into every browser these days), and would happily give Nova a try if they support a decent vim-emulation mode, but without it’s a non starter for me. These days I feel heavily handicapped without it, just recently some tool dropped me into nano and I felt like a child adding random characters to various places in the document while trying to force myself to navigate the text correctly, muscle memory is a strange beast.
• protomyth 6y ago
  I love Panic and am pretty sure this will be a great app, but I have a question on the category. Is there some reason that text macros aren't a built-in feature more often? I spent a lot of years using the very simple PFE on Windows because it had text macros and code snippets / templates. VS Code doesn't have them and neither does this one. Do people not find this useful or at least useful? I guess I do a lot of data munging with coding.
• jpillora 6y ago
  Any know much about Nova, and how hard it would be to integrate the Go Language Server with it? seeing as it conforms to LSP
• m1keil 6y ago
  As much as I would like to use this, the lack of cross platform support is a big no go for me. The same way I became 1Password customer _after_ they introduced support for Windows and Android (which I need). It looks like a wonderful product for someone who is dead set locked into Apple eco system.
  • the_lucifer 6y ago
    Well, to be honest Panic have been Mac exclusive developers for upwards of 20 years now. I don’t see things changing anytime soon.
  • leadingthenet 6y ago
    Why? This is a text editor, not a service that you might reasonably access from multiple platforms (like 1Pass).
• devit 6y ago
  How does it compare to VSCodium? Given that it starts with the huge handicaps of being proprietary and commercial, requiring a proprietary OS with very limited hardware support, and having far less extensions than VSCodium, it seems very unlikely it can compete.
• m0zg 6y ago
  As a small business owner, I envy Panic, in a good way. They do great work, and charge good money for it, and people don't mind paying because if you know Panic, you know their product is worth the cost. That's priceless. I wish they did more, TBH. I'd pay just to enjoy their work.
• theCodeStig 6y ago
  Lost me at mini-map...
• hestefisk 6y ago
  Very interesting editor. I would love an editor like this on Windows! Please please port it :)
• ashton314 6y ago
  That website though—genuinely made me smile. I love the star field animation and the warp-drive effect when you hover over the "download" button.
• waffletower 6y ago
  I don't see Clojure(script) on the list of supported languages :(
• fmoronzirfas 6y ago
  Hm. Looks quite nice but does not work out of the box with fish shell and or Node installed using nvm only. It gives me a hint like this: > Prettier couldn't be found because npm isn't available. Please make sure you have Node installed. If you've only installed Node through NVM, you'll need to change your shell configuration to work with Nova. See https://library.panic.com/nova/environment-variables/ https://library.panic.com/nova/environment-variables/ Unfortunately the documentation is for zsh and bash only. Has anyone an idea how to get this up and running with any other shell?
• planb 6y ago
  I tried to open a 300MB file and it gave me the spinning wheel. If there's one thing I would expect of a new editor (and they even wrote their own text layout engine), then that it's designed for large files and incremental loading from the ground up.
• ajavascriptdude 6y ago
  Keeps crashing on a large project. Extensions have a lot of bugs.
• statictype 6y ago
  It looks great. Very Panic-y. I'm surprised that they didn't use Cmd-P, using Cmd-Shift-O instead. What's the precedent for it? I thought Cmd-P was now universally used to locate files. Do Mac apps like Xcode use Cmd-Shift-O instead?
• sneak 6y ago
  I love Panic and I love hacking, and I started hacking on the Mac and will always have a soft spot for the macOS. I'm glad they built this and their other cool (but proprietary) software, despite the fact that software freedom is really important. That said, I'll never use a toolchain that isn't free software. These are my work tools, into which I invest decades of muscle memory and configuration. Between Apple's lack of emphasis on long term application BC, and their increasingly locked down hardware (and I type this on an iMac Pro with T2 and firmware security on), I just can't invest my time and energy into the most critical of my development tools (an editor) that isn't going to come with me to any platform or device that I ever end up using, or, more importantly, be hackable. It's sort of like fire insurance. I hope to never, ever need to use it (recompile my editor with a change), but the idea of having some of my most valuable resources/investments at risk, with no recourse should the worst happen, is insane to me.
• liendolucas 6y ago
  More and more I see new apps being released and having a subscription model. Pay X for the tool plus Y every year to get updates. Paying 99$ and then 49$ each year is (at least for me) too much money and a no go. If after a year bugs are discovered on the purchase that I initially made, why shouldn't I receive that for free? Subscriptions are ok for services and I don't really care, but products shouldn't be on a subscription model. Just my opinion.
  • jpcooper43 6y ago
    Agreed 100%
• manzu 6y ago
  I love Panic but I don’t see why I’d buy and use this instead of PHPStorm which I get on Windows also.
• bestest 6y ago
  Trying it out now. My findings so far: - no vertical tabs (ditto for vscode though); - no diff, unless I'm missing it; I try to live without vertical tabs, but missing diffing is a show stopper.
• saos 6y ago
  No thanks. Sticking to VSC
• iansinnott 6y ago
  I'm a bit confused by the value prop here, or maybe I'm just missing it. There seems to be much talk of theming and extensibility, features which every existing text editor has. This is not meant to put down the product—I've bought and enjoyed multiple Panic products in the past.
• nodesocket 6y ago
  I use Sublime Text 3 for nearly all my DevOps work. I figured that I'd give Nova a try as I was a big Coda fan back in the day. I opened up Nova and first installed HCL (language support for HashiCorp's Terraform and Packer). Then I looked for Shellcheck[1] validator, but was disappointed it did not exist. Then I search for Kubernetes and Helm wondering if there were any specific extensions, but no results. Next up was installing Dockerfile and ENV syntax highlighting. Overall still tinkering around, but Nova seems very promising. [1] https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck
• tripue 6y ago
  There's a little bug on the landing, you can't press any of the top bar buttons as long as you haven't scrolled enough.
• jyriand 6y ago
  Landing page UI took me by suprise. It's refreshing in some sens, but little bit broken. Can't really click on the items in the navbar. Have to scroll down little bit first, and only then the links are clickable.
• nxpnsv 6y ago
  Nova is pretty, i liked the synthwave neon mode (probably would not use it for an extended amount of time though). Markdown preview was not great. App crashed when I attempted a git commit. I think I'll wait for a little while before trying it again.
• chriscaruso 6y ago
  Just use VSCode
• spurgu 6y ago
  What the hell is this site doing? Fans blowing, 40-50% GPU usage.
• habosa 6y ago
  I probably won't use this (I'm fine with my current editors) but I want to give the creators credit for what looks like a very complete and feature-packed first release. So many things on day one! Nice to see software that looks ready to use.
• warpspin 6y ago
  Tried it out a few minutes. While I like the polish, this cannot (yet) compete with Sublime Text for me (and remote editting is one of the major weaknesses of Sublime currently, even with available extensions, while it looks as if it might be one of the strengths of Nova). It already starts with the editor itself, which has only one word wrapping mode (the other mode is horizontal scrolling), where it will wrap the lines at pretty arbitrary locations due to its desire to implement "word" wrapping, instead of also offering a simple mode which simply breaks the current work :-( If basic editting does not fit my style, it is a no go no matter what other niceties it might have, once the extension stuff starts going for real.
• deddo 6y ago
  How is this any different from say Sublime Text?
  • leadingthenet 6y ago
    It uses native Mac UI widgets, and feels very Apple-y.
• hivacruz 6y ago
  Coda was one of my first real editor. Sure it wasn't complete but it helped me getting better before switching to Sublime Text. I just pushed a theme for Nova called "Hivacruz", the same I created for other applications. Hope it will please some developers. It is a nice piece of software. Props to Panic.
• hashkb 6y ago
  Panic should stop making editors, and if they _must_ make a new one, they should not continue to make and market "web" editors. There is a class of tech workers who find apps like this and then stop exploring. As a result, they become marginally effective using Panic's oversimplified workflows, and then stop exploring. I'm thinking in particular of Coda's remote editing - and wouldn't you know it, remote file browser is a promoted feature of Nova too! Built-in diffing is "on their list". So I naturally assume that anyone who uses Panic's apps is incompatible with any project I'd be working on; because they're going to try to educate me on how much simpler and faster remote editing is than using a VCS. (Edit: and it's not their fault, it's Panic's fault, for trying to make money off text editors for people who are afraid of the command line.)
• thebouv 6y ago
  I feel like buying it to support them because Mac native app companies are few and far between. And Transmit was good when I needed to use it (haven't forever). And Coda was my main editor for a long time. But I'll still use VS Code cause I work on a Mac and on Linux and it's nice for it to just be the same. And I have no complaints to solve with VS Code. It does exactly what I need for Python and other stuff.
• mikorym 6y ago
  The first sentence on the website is: > Can a native Mac code editor really be that much better? I honestly thought that this must be a fork of Text Wrangler. Footnote: Text Wrangler was merged into BBEdit and this was superficially complicated enough that I never made the switch. I think this is an I promise the problem is with me situation.
• SimDeBeau 6y ago
  I really wish there was c support. At least c syntax highlighting. Seems like an awesome editor, but lacking c, c++ and rust support is a real bummer
• ariosto 6y ago
  I've been waiting for this editor! Is there a way to run a nodejs debugger in it?