17 ms·

Nova by Panic

356 points by cercatrova 5y ago

themodelplumber 5y ago
Congratulations Panic team! That's really great. I remember how exciting it was to first purchase Coda back in '07 or '08. Hopefully Nova works out as an equally awesome solution for those using Mac OS.
- cercatrova 5y ago
  FYI they actually launched in 2020 [0], but there were a paucity of features back then compared to VSCode (like Vim mode). They've been updating it over the years so it's cool to see where they are now. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495330
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - artdigital 5y ago
    Looks like it finally got a (although basic) vim emulation layer as well! Neat! https://library.panic.com/nova/vim/ https://library.panic.com/nova/vim/
    - lelandfe 5y ago
      I adore how blunt they are about what features they do and do not support on this page.
ogazitt 5y ago
Nice! The download was painless, the memory footprint seems to be lower than VSCode. The set of extensions is really nice for 18 months of work since the original launch. When will there be a Rego extension? (Rego is the OPA policy language)
- Cyberdog 5y ago
  VS Code is an Electron app. Pretty much anything that isn't a web browser will have a lower memory footprint. Nova is a proper Mac app, which is one of the reasons I love it so much. No Electron to gobble up RAM and CPU needlessly and no slow multi-platform Java stuff with a wrong UI.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
I've admired Panic for the entirety of my career, they're always doing really nice work, and I'm glad they're still going strong in a time where native desktop apps aren't really the du jour.
- echelon 5y ago
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    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/ https://panic.com/blog/the-panic-office/)... but they do a lot of creative work and in my experience it's hard to brainstorm and do creative problem solving remotely (not impossible, but also not the same).
    - AceJohnny2 5y ago
      Nitpick: they didn't "make Firewatch". It was developed by Campo Santo (since acquihired by Valve), and published (in part) by Panic. But I was surprised to learn they are the ones who made Untitled Goose Game.
      - toastercat 5y ago
        They only published Goose Game. It was developed by an indie studio from Australia.
        AceJohnny2 5y ago
        You're right, I misread the wikipedia page.
      - 5y ago
justinator 5y ago
Looks good. If it works out better than TextMate, I'm all in.
- justinator 5y ago
  Split panes (infinite amounts!) of the same doc? OK - here's my money.
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    VS Code has that as pretty much the only command button in the tab area.
    - justinator 5y ago
      It something I miss in TextMate - it was a thing even in BBEdit in the 90's that I found very useful.
- justinator 5y ago
  Hmm, no way to check syntax or run a file from within the editor? (or find the extension for the language you need?). Having a local terminal in the editor may work just as well, but that's a bit of a bummer.
  - Cyberdog 5y ago
    To find extensions, select "Extension Library" from the "Extensions" menu. Not entirely sure what you mean by "run a file," but under "Project Settings" ("Project" menu) you can set up scripts for building, running, and cleaning a project, and after you do so buttons to run those scripts appear in the toolbar.
    - justinator 5y ago
      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.
bovermyer 5y ago
I really wanted to like Nova. I paid for it (and used it) for a year. In the end, though... I switched back to VS Code. Native apps like this are much faster than such things, but I had too many use cases for the plugins. Kind of the same experience as Sublime Text. It's _really fast_, but I just rely too much on plugins when the experience requires something more than vim.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  I had a similar experience, but -- possibly counter-intuitively! -- ended up going mostly all-in back on BBEdit 14 when it was released with LSP support which has proven to be a lot less, well, flaky than Nova. I like VS Code a lot and may yet return to it as my main coding editor if I go back to a big project, but BBEdit has always been my old warhorse when it comes to my technical writing because it's just such a Swiss Army Knife for text processing. And BBEdit with Intelephense for PHP or with my own Elixir package for (surprise) Elixir has worked really well. Nova is pretty, and I'm impressed that they've added a Vim mode, although I haven't been able to really give it a try (my year expired before that was added!). But for me, it wasn't just a lack of plugins, it was that functionality I wanted wasn't there and the functionality that was front and center, like integrated Transmit and Terminal tabs, just wasn't that important to me.
  - bovermyer 5y ago
    Sounds like we really did have a similar experience - Nova is _great_, but not what we need. I have very specific and weird needs. For example, I need syntax highlighting for LaTeX, but in a non-mathematic-but-programmatic-control-of-layout way. VS Code supports that, oddly enough. No other text editor does.
  - artdigital 5y ago
    fwiw, I just checked it out again and there is a basic VIM emulation layer now
    - dgl 5y ago
mberning 5y ago
I hope they stick to it. It takes a long time to put down roots. People were dismissive of intellij and jetbrains, but look at them now.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Yes, we need more competition. PyCharm feels so bloated and trying Nova, the speed is incredible. Keyboard latency is something that's underappreciated but it is night and day for me.
echelon 5y ago
I have no need for their product, but I really admire their website. Warp speed. What a clever call to action! Pretty genius. The animation showing different color schemes is really slick too. Kudos to whomever made this.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
Bought this a year ago when I saw it on here before haha. Very happy customer, don’t need VSCode anymore - and I have Jetbrains for the “heavy” stuff :)
smoldesu 5y ago
Reminds me a bit of GNOME Builder mixed with the (now defunct) Atom editor. Neither of them really clicked for me, but hey, at least it looks like they have VCS functionality figured out better than most people.
BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
The download button hover effect is very pretty, but holy smokes you have to warn a person first.
- acomjean 5y ago
  fun! I didn't notice that till you mentioned it.
AceJohnny2 5y ago
Does it support LSP (Language Server Protocol)? I see no reference to it either on the splash page or in the extensions.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  > As of Nova 2, the IDE implements a subset of version 3.15 of the LSP specification. https://docs.nova.app/api-reference/language-client/#languageclient https://docs.nova.app/api-reference/language-client/#languag...
Lammy 5y ago
> "No-Fuss Analytics & Privacy Settings" I can't recall a time that analytics have ever made a "fuss" for me, but that's not why I dislike them :( I don't own a modern Mac, so I can't check the settings out myself, but that's the first thing I would look at after reading this in the features list. Looks great otherwise though, and it's cute how it rhymes with "Coda".
- FateOfNations 5y ago
  It's probably alluding to https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry which isn't exactly straight forward.
  - paulgb 5y ago
    Yeah, I’ve never given it much though for personal use, but I’ve used VS code in a professional setting with strict policies around stuff like that, and “fuss” is a good word to describe the steps to use VS Code in that environment.
- weikju 5y ago
  could be "no-fuss settings" for "analytics & privacy", not "settings for:" "no-fuss analytics" and "privacy"
  - Lammy 5y ago
    Oh, duh, you're totally right. I guess I've been doing too much programming lately that I read those as separate things offered together
acomjean 5y ago
I used to have coda. I guess they renamed it Nova: https://panic.com/coda/ https://panic.com/coda/ I wanted to love (Coda) it but it wasn't good enough for me to switch. This looks slick, but I work multi-platform so this while it looks great, if doesn't do linux I'm out. They even talk about the lack of cross platform in the copy. If I need speed I'll use Vim or emacs. For day to day I bought the JetBrains suite. For a pretty inovative company, it looks a lot like exiting editors. I'll keep using Panic's transmit on Mac.. And hoping someone makes a sftp client as good on linux...
- seltzered_ 5y ago
  Worth noting Coda (for iOS / iPad) was discontinued in May 2021: https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-code-editor/ https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-code-editor/ (personally, I kept waiting for such a vision to make sense and ended up running Sublime Text on a Linux tablet pc instead)
- Cyberdog 5y ago
  It's a whole new program from scratch, not just an update of Coda, so a new name was appropriate.
svnpenn 5y ago
Highlighting support is bad: > For the curious, Nova has built-in support for CoffeeScript, CSS, Diff, ERB, Haml, HTML, INI, JavaScript, JSON, JSX, Less, Lua, Markdown, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Sass, SCSS, Smarty, SQL, TSX, TypeScript, XML, and YAML. Youre supporting stuff like Diff and Haml, but not stuff like Go or Rust?
- api 5y ago
  Their ecosystem seems very web-centric.
  - lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
    Yep. Panic have always made tools that are mostly aimed at front-end web devs. Coda, the editor that became Nova, was marketed as a "web editor". Nova specifically still uses that phrase "web editor". Coda's main competitors back in the day included tools like CSSEdit and Espresso, tools that helped those working on CSS by giving a nice front-end where you could click around in the UI and it'd insert the relevant properties for each style without you having to remember the syntax, and then updating a live preview. All of which seems rather quaint now we have pretty good developer tools in most browsers, but back in the mid-to-late 2000s, that was a big deal for a lot of web devs. And for web developers who are writing predominantly HTML and CSS (possibly with some kind of template wrapping), a bit of JS, and a teeny bit of PHP/whatever on the backend, "it doesn't support Rust" etc. is not a major problem for them.
- Cyberdog 5y ago
  Here's a Rust extension: https://github.com/kilbd/nova-rust https://github.com/kilbd/nova-rust And here's the one of the three for Go which looks the most robust from cursory glance: https://github.com/GwynethLlewelyn/Go.novaextension https://github.com/GwynethLlewelyn/Go.novaextension Both of these were found by searching the built-in extensions library.
  - artdigital 5y ago
    Just tried the Go extension and it's sadly not very usable. Functional yes, but not very usable
wyuenho 5y ago
I don't understand why every editor these days come with a minimap, and many of them turn it on by default. I know Sublime introduced it but what does it do exactly? Why is everyone copying it? It just shows you the shapes of blocks of texts of a long file from ten meters away. It doesn't tell you what they are or what they do, or even how to get there. Every IDE since at least the early 2000s gave you an index or a tree menu or something for navigation, VS Code has a breadcrumb IN ADDITION TO the minimap, possibly because Microsoft realizes its gimmick nature. Why not just get rid of it to free up more screen real estate for actually useful things?
- bjt 5y ago
  It can be very useful when the work you're doing requires jumping between 2-3 different parts of a file. Yes, you can probably do the same with ctrl-f, but for many people it's more intuitive to have the visual representation.
  - wyuenho 5y ago
    Things like jump to definition and references exist for this reason.
- mholt 5y ago
  With my workflows, I really don't need that inch of my editor. The minimap is useful because it lets me instantly go anywhere in the file using visual cues. Some minimaps show you details when you hover or click and drag. Anyway, I have a hard time being productive without it.
- mfext 5y ago
  Its mostly useful to me if I’m scanning a longer file for merge conflicts. By clicking the minimap I can get to an error easily enough. It’s also a literal bird’s eye view when I’m reverse engineering something. YMMV
- hiyer 5y ago
  I've found minimaps to be useful when you're also using linters or compilers - you can quickly jump to the next error by looking at the little red dots or lines on the minimap.
Klonoar 5y ago
I will reiterate my chief complaint with this: it should have just copied the VSCode extensions API from day one and relied on easier porting of them.
- jamil7 5y ago
  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.
  - zshbleaker 5y ago
    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.
    - Klonoar 5y ago
      How much experience do you have with the product in question...? Last I checked it literally embeds a JS engine with a custom API for extensions. Unless something has changed since I last looked... but if I glance at this URL (scroll down to "Providing a TreeView") it doesn't appear to have: https://docs.nova.app/extensions/sidebars/#defining-a-sidebar https://docs.nova.app/extensions/sidebars/#defining-a-sideba... There is simply no reason it has to be different from the VSCode API; you can set up JavaScriptCore to hook into whatever native components you need. VSCode owns the market, full stop. This should mimic the API as much as possible to enable wider extension porting. Hell, you could cover even a fraction of the VSCode API and that would still be more useful than the current Nova extensions API.
    - jamil7 5y ago
      I'm aware of the selling point I was asking specifically about the extension API.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  The problem with doing that is that you've now created a substantial dependency for your commercial product, and not a dependency that's merely the "requires npm package foo" kind of dependency. Because Nova is not VSCode, being compatible with Code's extensions API means: - committing to implementing every new documented Code API function as quickly, completely, and transparently as possible, because if you don't, extensions will break; - resolving mismatches between how Electron apps do things and how AppKit apps do things, which may be easier said than done; - possibly choosing not to support functionality in extensions that Code doesn't have; - putting control of your flagship product in someone else's hands. So I'm not really surprised Panic hasn't done that. If there were a way to create a basic converter that takes a Code extension as input and spits out a likely-needs-work Nova extension, kind of like there's a converter for TextMate syntax definition files to Code's format, that would be great, although that would almost certainly be easier said than done.
ViaSuffragio 5y ago
jhatemyjob 5y ago
I wish there were more companies like Panic. Looking from the outside, it gives me the impression I got from pre 2004 Google and pre 2010 Valve. It seems like the primary focus is making cool stuff, and money is just a way to keep the lights on.
brunoqc 5y ago
It's a bit pricey.
- Cyberdog 5y ago
  Like other tradesmen I'm glad to pay for tools which make me more productive. Nova is the best code editor on the Mac in my humble (but correct) opinion and it has paid for itself many, many times over.
  - brunoqc 5y ago
    Fair enough. In my case, if every thing that makes me productive would cost $100 a year, I would be broke.
  - shagie 5y ago
    At $100, its coming in close to IntelliJ all product pack (I've had it since the Mayan end of the world). Its also quite a bit more than BBEdit (which I've had since If it was closer to BBEdit (which I've had since System 6 days), I'd consider switching the text editor - it looks nice. For me, the price per year compared to products that I already have that have more functionality would be for something that I don't use as much. It looks nice. If it was in the $25-$50/year, I'd be considering it for the situations where I open up VSCode instead of BBEdit for some functionality there... but the price for where it is in my toolchain doesn't replace something worth that much per year.
    - lelandfe 5y ago
      You own Nova for life at $99, it's only a recurring cost if you want updates. Subsequent years are $49. ...Whereas the all product pack is $250 a year to use.
      - brunoqc 5y ago
        I don't think many people don't want updates. I would guess that if someone is willing to pay $100 for it (because the person likes the features that Nova has over their other tools), that it's likely that person will also want the new shiny features every year. Also, I wouldn't be surprised that some plugins might take advantages of some new features.
spicybright 5y ago
Meh. Sublime had every one of these features 5+ years ago. Best of luck to them though.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Not to mention, Sublime gives you 3 years of updates for your $99, as opposed to the 1 year you get with Nova.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  Sublime to this day does not have native LSP support.
  - cbeley 5y ago
    https://github.com/sublimelsp/LSP https://github.com/sublimelsp/LSP with https://github.com/sublimelsp/LSP-typescript https://github.com/sublimelsp/LSP-typescript works pretty well for me. They are also both being actively maintained. It'd be nice if it was built-in, but it works well enough that I still have not found a compelling reason to switch to VSCode. I really love sublime and it doesn't seem to be dead just yet. Sublime Text 4 was also a pretty great release.
dawnerd 5y ago
I've been using the VSCode remote ssh feature for a while now and I really can't see myself switching to another editor unless it also had a similar feature. Being able to quickly configure and use a remote server is just too huge a feature to give up now. This looks great though, and the site is beautiful. Wish it was for me.
- wirthjason 5y ago
  +1. I use that SSH feature every day as my primary way of coding.
- Cyberdog 5y ago
  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…"
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    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 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. It is astonishing. I too cannot imagine going back to an editor that cannot do this. It has been so useful in conjunction with vagrant boxes, with a bit of ssh_config magic I wrote here that manages an ssh_config include file that (amazingly) VSC will follow: (warning: ugly) https://github.com/bbenoist/vscode-vagrant/issues/18#issuecomment-730614334 https://github.com/bbenoist/vscode-vagrant/issues/18#issueco...
    - Cyberdog 5y ago
      > 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.
chrysoprace 5y ago
I don't mind native apps, but if the trade-off is that it's platform exclusive then that's unacceptable in 2022. Platform exclusivity is such a massive step backwards.
- theonemind 5y ago
  different strokes for different folks. I don't mind cross platform, but I find Electron unacceptable in any year as a massive step backwards in UI and usability. (Not that you mentioned any Electron-based competitors by name, but a lot of cross-platform big-name competition in the text editor space does use Electron, like VS Code, Atom, and Brackets.)
  - chrysoprace 5y ago
    The competition they have to beat is VSCode and JetBrains - nothing else compares. Yes, VSCode is based on Electron but it shows that it can work well. That's the competition they have to beat. If I can't use an IDE because it's locked to a proprietary OS that requires me to buy specialty hardware to run it then it loses by default.
    - spiderice 5y ago
      To echo what GP said, different strokes for different folks. For me I love that it's Mac native (whereas VSCode and JetBrains aren't, and it shows). I use nothing but Macs, and that isn't changing any time soon. Nothing but great for me.
- alwillis 5y ago
  I’ve loved Panic for a long time, going back to Audion back in the day. Nova is the artisanal indie Mac app at its best. But unless your use case is exactly what Nova was designed to do, it doesn’t quite meet your needs. Like a lot of people have essentially said, I love the concept of Nova, but it didn’t quite measure up. In the meanwhile, Neovim (my primary editor) has really taken off and while some of the GUIs for it are great, they don’t have the fit and finish and polish of something like Nova. Now if someone were to create a Panic-like UI/UX for Neovim, I’d pay for that in a heartbeat.
TheSocialAndrew 5y ago
I've been trying Nova for the last couple of months. Native it may be, but the performance with larger files is not on par with Sublime. Also it has some weird bugs (mostly in Git and in the handling of files) and it does crash occasionally. It's very promising though and if anyone can stick by a product it's Panic. Also their apps are classic Mac -- eye candy but with thought out UX.
drusepth 5y ago
OT: How are "minimap" features in text editors actually implemented? Do they actually have a second rendering of your entire document running, just significantly scaled down? Are they building geometric shapes based on the shape of your text? What effect do they have on performance as document lengths grow larger and larger?
biztos 5y ago
I tried this out some months ago and had really mixed feelings, but I will give it another shot because generally speaking, Panic is awesome! My main complaints at the time were a confusing extensions ecosystem; difficulty rolling your own; and the sense that (as with Coda) "programmer" means a person hand-coding web sites with HTML+CSS and maybe Javascript or PHP. Seemed like they weren't trying to convince anybody who already used VSCode et al. That said, I have had some difficulty adjusting to Sublime's way of doing things, and VS never felt right to me, so maybe I'm just picky. In any case I am happy to see another opinionated text editor in the mix! [Edit: And right out of the box now, no support for Go files, not even syntax coloring, and it thinks go.mod is a media file and won't display its text. Searching extensions for "go" gets me three different extensions and no way to tell which is better/more-popular; and also shows me six totally unrelated extensions, three of which have "go" in their titles e.g. "django" and three of which do not. So... still not really shooting for the programmer market, but I will keep trying!] [Edit2: Similar results for Rust. And extensions have to be written in Javascript, and the boilerplate is all for published extensions which maybe makes sense, but I really want an easy way to pipe ($BUFFER|$CLIPBOARD) to an arbitrary program and put the result in ($BUFFER|CLIPBOARD) with a pop-up on failure, and I find it really weird that there is so much shell integration but not that. OK shutting up now, playing with editor...]
- ztjio 5y ago
  I share this experience. I come back and check on it every few months. It continues to baffle me what their priorities are. VIM support but extensions can't even BUILD or RUN. I love the idea of a native macOS IDE, but it seems like this will never be something I can actually use productively or ever recommend to anyone. Would happy to be proven wrong.
- jamil7 5y ago
  > And right out of the box now, no support for Go files, not even syntax coloring, and it thinks go.mod is a media file and won't display its text. I just had a similar experience, no Go or Swift (ok understandable maybe) support out of the box. But I paid for it it anyway since I like what they’re going for and have admired the company for a long time.
stephc_int13 5y ago
Gorgeous design, I wish it would be available outside of the Apple ecosystem, I'd consider it even if I've been very happy with my paid Sublime4 license. I think Sublime HQ showed that making a multiplatform editor is not much more difficult, but hey...
- shaicoleman 5y ago
  > I think Sublime HQ showed that making a multiplatform editor is not much more difficult, but hey... The developers of Sublime have a different view on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29638810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29638810
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    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.
    - KerrAvon 5y ago
      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 be improved?
      - saagarjha 5y ago
        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?
p0larboy 5y ago
Nothing to do with the IDE but I just want to point out that the homepage design is sick. The 3D space in the background did not affect the scroll performance and it adds a really good vibe without affecting the UX. Love it!
- Narishma 5y ago
  It may look sick but it's eating battery like there is no tomorrow. It's pegging 2 of my CPU cores at 100% constantly.
- pmontra 5y ago
  There was a design like that for another news yesterday or the day before. I wonder if we're headed back into the 80s with web design. It happened with clothes a few years ago (very high waist jeans.) There was no web in the 80s but there were arcade games and that front page looks like the start screen of some game back at the time. We'll see if it trends.
incanus77 5y ago
I’ve been doing bare metal kernel development and Docker for my build system in Nova for over a year now.
cercatrova 5y ago
I tried Nova when it first launched and again recently, and I switched back to VSCode due to the numerous plugins and prodigious output of its creators every month. In my opinion, Nova (through its lack) shows the true power of network effects, even in code editors, because even though VSCode is an inferior product in many respects, like speed and resource usage, it still wins due to its sheer popularity and extensibility. In a way, it is the story of JavaScript itself: a bad language that only works due to its popularity; as one uses JS, one continues to use JS as others do too, creating a virtuous cycle.
- nsonha 5y ago
  To be fair this "worse is better" thing permiates all aspects of tech: c++, java, python, wasteful text based protocols...
  - ThouYS 5y ago
    in the case of python: "better is better" ;)
    - nine_k 5y ago
      As in "very slow though flexible is better".
      - utunga 5y ago
        I get why you are saying an interpreted language is slow but given that people use python to orchestrate most compute intense (AI) and data-heavy (data science) work, it obviously does a pretty excellent job of being pretty 'fast' in practice - ie offloading the 'slow' bits to dedicated code.
    - nsonha 5y ago
      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".
crumbits 5y ago
I just can’t support Panic after they burned me and so many other Mac users with Unison.
- haswell 5y ago
  Are you talking about Panic end-of-lifting a product but releasing a final free build? I’m curious about which aspect you see as burning.
  - crumbits 5y ago
    I bought it years before they EOL’d it and bugs were never fixed.
- natch 5y ago
  Same with Coda. I used it maybe four times, forget the price I paid but let’s say $40; probably came out to $10 per use. It was nice. I was happy with the purchase, or thought I was until they pulled the rug out. I thought it would have long term value. Planned to use it much more in the coming years when I get into some web projects. And now it’s orphaned. Why did they ask for my money if they were going to do that?
  - austhrow743 5y ago
    Presumably they thought you wanted to use it as it was and when you bought it.
  - jakelazaroff 5y ago
    Coda 2 was released in 2012. Nova came out in 2020. Is eight years of free updates not “long term value”?
  - timw4mail 5y ago
    Coda still works, so what's the issue?
resolutefool 5y ago
Love the apps that Panic makes, they are great on the UX front. But I'm still a bit hesitant to try/buy this. VS Code's rich extension marketplace has sorta 'locked me in' to their product.
threatofrain 5y ago
Another interesting competitor: https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/ https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/ Previous discussion on Nova https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495330 (Sept 2020) [542 comments]
- Cyberdog 5y ago
  Still not a Mac-native app. The tab, with its always-visible (as opposed to just on hover) close widget on the wrong side, is a big give-away.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Well, thanks for that. I hate this native behavior.
- mobilewatch7 5y ago
  I’m a longtime php dev using php storm on Mac. Php storm is ugly but the Symfony plug-in is great. My pain points are around local dev versions of different projects (never seem to get docker running) and running tests and setting up deployment pipelines. Nova doesn’t seem to move the ball in any of these areas
adamredwoods 5y ago
>> Nova requires macOS 10.15.7 or later. It is not possible to run Nova on earlier versions of macOS. I can't run it on my old, BUT STILL HIGHLY USABLE Macbook Pro 2011, OSX 10.13.6.
- pilif 5y ago
  highly usable but also EOLed and thus without security updates for more than a year now. Aside of the security issues, I think it's asking a lot of a third party releasing a new product to ship with support for OSes not supported by their first-party manufacturer.
- petecooper 5y ago
  >> Nova requires macOS 10.15.7 or later. It is not possible to run Nova on earlier versions of macOS. Nova 7.5 (edit: previous release series) runs just fine on my 10.14.6 Mac mini from 2012.
- cercatrova 5y ago
  To be fair, expecting software to work on a decade old machine is not what macOS is about, that which killed all 32 bit programs recently. If you're looking for compatibility, stick with Windows and perhaps Linux.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
lloydjones 5y ago
The landing page seems to rely heavily on: - Users’ familiarity with Coda as a reference point for its increased quality - Statements about the hard work that’s gone into it I say this as a huge Panic fan. It just felt ‘off’ to me, like the initial arguments for trying it are “look how hard we tried” and “it’s better than our old product”. This may be an unfair assessment but it’s what stood out for me. Having said all of this, I’ll still give it a go!
- koenbok 5y ago
  Although the page does rely a bit on things that mostly Mac fans will appreciate, I didn’t have the same impression. It’s fun to see how true Panic stays to their craft and it’s great to have the best native benchmark out there to compare to cross platform (web) approaches.
rcarmo 5y ago
No LISP syntax support, I see. Now that I think of it, I don’t believe Panic’s previous editor(s?) had it either.
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  The plugin architecture as of a few versions ago didn’t seem to be sophisticated enough to support s-expr languages. I expect this to improve over time, but it was enough to keep me from using the app/buying a license back then.
hankman86 5y ago
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 plus in favour of VSCode. I totally get the performance argument. That’s why I will never use a Java-based IDE again. Like JetBrains IDEs are just painfully slow where every key stroke has this additional lag before something appears on screen. But thankfully VSCode isn’t like that. Whatever upside another editor might be offering wouldn’t make much of a difference for me. I fear that the days of native productivity apps are over.
- ihateolives 5y ago
  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 you're running JetBrains products so that they are slower.
  - dubcanada 5y ago
    Ya no idea, I've used JetBrains IDEs for years and they've been great. I suspect a lot of people have 400 chrome tabs open and then open up their IDE and blame their IDE for being slow.
  - throwaway675309 5y ago
    Same, even when I have four large monolithic repos open in four separate instances of jetbrains, webstorm is still amazingly responsive.
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  Panic writes software for Apple products.
michelb 5y ago
I like how Nova is getting solid updates regularly. It must be tough to write a new code editor from scratch knowing that you are up against VSCode, Sublime and Jetbrains apps. I think it's going to fit in nicely though, for a large enough group of Mac users to be a sustainable venture. I'm not quite ready to replace my existing apps but it's getting there.
robinduckett 5y ago
I used to love Panic, but since I became a professional developer, I switched to better tools. They seem to cater solely to amateur freelance. It's not a bad audience, I'm just not a part of it anymore.
abricq 5y ago
I was surprised to see that there is no language support for C++, C, Rust, etc... I saw that there are community plugins. But still, it does make me a little sad to see this shifting away from compiled languages to more scripted or web-based options, as for example: not a single (famous) compiled language in the default supported ones of a brand new code editor.
- no_time 5y ago
  Imagine working on a text editor that you don't even use to work on that said editor.
- colordrops 5y ago
  They list "coffeescript" first in their supported languages. Is that even still a thing?
  - niek_pas 5y ago
    The list of languages is alphabetically sorted. That’s why coffeescript comes first.
    - colordrops 5y ago
      Right, why would they do that when it's clear that everything on the page is designed and intentional?
  - alanh 5y ago
    Yes, it’s still a thing, although virtually no one is using it for new projects.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
brailsafe 5y ago
I managed to make Nova work for some trivial frontend stuff, but not having a built-in robust git client really threw my workflow off. I don't really like using a separate terminal for diffing, nor do I like the default diff viewer for git anyway, nor do I want to buy Kaleidoscope for a billion dollars for that one thing, which would be an external viewer anyway. Yes I want a native mac app, but it doesn't really count as a better experience if some of my interactions are slightly more spiffy and some key things aren't present at all. I do like something that is just a good text editor like TextMate was, but Coda and Nova were always trying to be in this middle-ground area. Macrabbit used to have a great app for thibg called Espresso which I loved for just CSS, HTML, and Basic JS. I'd give Nova another shot in a second if there was a significant feature-rich update, that includes things that other people rightfully get hung-up on. Nova has something unique in both a product and market. The customer-base is willing to give it repeated shots before totally writing it off, and that's a blessing that the majority of companies don't get.
- dewey 5y ago
  Maybe something like https://git-fork.com https://git-fork.com would work for you? It has a decent enough diff viewer (Even though I prefer Kaleidoscope for bigger rebases), is native and an actively developed indie app. I'm a happy user and can recommend it.
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    That actually looks pretty good, thanks for the recommendation. What I meant to emphasize was that I like having zero overhead to making commits, and vscode does this better than anything I've used. If I was so inclined, I could just use VScode as the default diff viewer and that would be fine, but I really like having it right there while I'm coding without having to go to any other app.
  - the_lucifer 5y ago
    +1, I've been using Git Fork for years and it's a smooth and fast native Mac citizen
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
They’ve killed and restarted their editor projects way to many times, chasing Apple developer fads for me to invest in this. I do prefer native editors but will be sticking with Textmate 2. Slow but very consistent development over the past few years and open source.
bestest 5y ago
No vertical tabs? Oh well, WebStorm keeps on being the only choice then!
paulcole 5y ago
Panic should pivot away from software and just make landing/product pages for software companies.
wedn3sday 5y ago
Seems like a nice editor, I would happily pay $10 for, but its not so much better then VScode or Sublime to be worth $100.
evaneykelen 5y ago
A cursory look at the Ruby/Rails extensions for Nova indicates most of them were created 1-2 years ago and haven't received any updates. I will check the vibrancy of the ecosystem a bit more before giving Nova a renewed try (it could be, of course, that these extensions just work without a hitch and don't need any maintenance).
codeptualize 5y ago
I've been following it for while, I really wanted to like it but I just do not see it (yet). It's a huge investment to switch, and maybe I'm missing something but the only advantage atm seems to be "it's native". I don't have issues with speed, VSCode is plenty fast. Otherwise it's probably just struggling with plugins, and tbh I also don't particularly like how it looks. That said, I hope they keep at it and give me a reason to switch! Which is not impossible btw; I didn't like VSCode to start either (I was using Atom for a long time), but VSCode just won on support and that made me switch. It has come a long way, and I have come to like it after spending lots of time tweaking and theming everything.
sjs382 5y ago
I found the headline messaging super off-putting. "Can a native Mac code editor really be that much better? Find out." I'm pretty happy with VS Code, which is free (and before that, Atom, etc). Why put the onus on me to figure out why a $99 editor could be better? Show me. Tell me. I realize that they make an attempt to show/tell down the page, but a list of features that my current editor already has doesn't answer the original question in the affirmative.
joshstrange 5y ago
I love Panic and almost everything they do. I've bought many of their products and Coda was the first IDE-ish thing I've ever used. I love Coda but then I needed more powerful tools and Coda didn't cut it. Before Code 2 came out I had already move off them completely. I really wanted to like Nova and I hope others love it but I don't think I can go back from Intelij/IDEA. Best of luck to Panic in all their endeavors though, Transmit is my favorite app of theirs right now.

356 points by cercatrova 5y ago

Congratulations Panic team! That's really great. I remember how exciting it was to first purchase Coda back in '07 or '08. Hopefully Nova works out as an equally awesome solution for those using Mac OS.

cercatrova 5y ago
FYI they actually launched in 2020 [0], but there were a paucity of features back then compared to VSCode (like Vim mode). They've been updating it over the years so it's cool to see where they are now. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495330
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- artdigital 5y ago
  Looks like it finally got a (although basic) vim emulation layer as well! Neat! https://library.panic.com/nova/vim/ https://library.panic.com/nova/vim/
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    I adore how blunt they are about what features they do and do not support on this page.

ogazitt 5y ago

Nice! The download was painless, the memory footprint seems to be lower than VSCode. The set of extensions is really nice for 18 months of work since the original launch. When will there be a Rego extension? (Rego is the OPA policy language)

Cyberdog 5y ago
VS Code is an Electron app. Pretty much anything that isn't a web browser will have a lower memory footprint. Nova is a proper Mac app, which is one of the reasons I love it so much. No Electron to gobble up RAM and CPU needlessly and no slow multi-platform Java stuff with a wrong UI.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

I've admired Panic for the entirety of my career, they're always doing really nice work, and I'm glad they're still going strong in a time where native desktop apps aren't really the du jour.

echelon 5y ago
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  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/ https://panic.com/blog/the-panic-office/)... but they do a lot of creative work and in my experience it's hard to brainstorm and do creative problem solving remotely (not impossible, but also not the same).
  - AceJohnny2 5y ago
    Nitpick: they didn't "make Firewatch". It was developed by Campo Santo (since acquihired by Valve), and published (in part) by Panic. But I was surprised to learn they are the ones who made Untitled Goose Game.
    - toastercat 5y ago
      They only published Goose Game. It was developed by an indie studio from Australia.
      - AceJohnny2 5y ago
        You're right, I misread the wikipedia page.
    - 5y ago

justinator 5y ago

Looks good. If it works out better than TextMate, I'm all in.

justinator 5y ago
Split panes (infinite amounts!) of the same doc? OK - here's my money.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  VS Code has that as pretty much the only command button in the tab area.
  - justinator 5y ago
    It something I miss in TextMate - it was a thing even in BBEdit in the 90's that I found very useful.
justinator 5y ago
Hmm, no way to check syntax or run a file from within the editor? (or find the extension for the language you need?). Having a local terminal in the editor may work just as well, but that's a bit of a bummer.
- Cyberdog 5y ago
  To find extensions, select "Extension Library" from the "Extensions" menu. Not entirely sure what you mean by "run a file," but under "Project Settings" ("Project" menu) you can set up scripts for building, running, and cleaning a project, and after you do so buttons to run those scripts appear in the toolbar.
  - justinator 5y ago
    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.

bovermyer 5y ago

I really wanted to like Nova. I paid for it (and used it) for a year. In the end, though... I switched back to VS Code. Native apps like this are much faster than such things, but I had too many use cases for the plugins. Kind of the same experience as Sublime Text. It's _really fast_, but I just rely too much on plugins when the experience requires something more than vim.

chipotle_coyote 5y ago
I had a similar experience, but -- possibly counter-intuitively! -- ended up going mostly all-in back on BBEdit 14 when it was released with LSP support which has proven to be a lot less, well, flaky than Nova. I like VS Code a lot and may yet return to it as my main coding editor if I go back to a big project, but BBEdit has always been my old warhorse when it comes to my technical writing because it's just such a Swiss Army Knife for text processing. And BBEdit with Intelephense for PHP or with my own Elixir package for (surprise) Elixir has worked really well. Nova is pretty, and I'm impressed that they've added a Vim mode, although I haven't been able to really give it a try (my year expired before that was added!). But for me, it wasn't just a lack of plugins, it was that functionality I wanted wasn't there and the functionality that was front and center, like integrated Transmit and Terminal tabs, just wasn't that important to me.
- bovermyer 5y ago
  Sounds like we really did have a similar experience - Nova is _great_, but not what we need. I have very specific and weird needs. For example, I need syntax highlighting for LaTeX, but in a non-mathematic-but-programmatic-control-of-layout way. VS Code supports that, oddly enough. No other text editor does.
- artdigital 5y ago
  fwiw, I just checked it out again and there is a basic VIM emulation layer now
  - dgl 5y ago

mberning 5y ago

I hope they stick to it. It takes a long time to put down roots. People were dismissive of intellij and jetbrains, but look at them now.

systemvoltage 5y ago
Yes, we need more competition. PyCharm feels so bloated and trying Nova, the speed is incredible. Keyboard latency is something that's underappreciated but it is night and day for me.

echelon 5y ago

I have no need for their product, but I really admire their website. Warp speed. What a clever call to action! Pretty genius. The animation showing different color schemes is really slick too. Kudos to whomever made this.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

Bought this a year ago when I saw it on here before haha. Very happy customer, don’t need VSCode anymore - and I have Jetbrains for the “heavy” stuff :)

smoldesu 5y ago

Reminds me a bit of GNOME Builder mixed with the (now defunct) Atom editor. Neither of them really clicked for me, but hey, at least it looks like they have VCS functionality figured out better than most people.

BugsJustFindMe 5y ago

The download button hover effect is very pretty, but holy smokes you have to warn a person first.

acomjean 5y ago
fun! I didn't notice that till you mentioned it.

AceJohnny2 5y ago

Does it support LSP (Language Server Protocol)? I see no reference to it either on the splash page or in the extensions.

lelandfe 5y ago
> As of Nova 2, the IDE implements a subset of version 3.15 of the LSP specification. https://docs.nova.app/api-reference/language-client/#languageclient https://docs.nova.app/api-reference/language-client/#languag...

Lammy 5y ago

> "No-Fuss Analytics & Privacy Settings" I can't recall a time that analytics have ever made a "fuss" for me, but that's not why I dislike them :( I don't own a modern Mac, so I can't check the settings out myself, but that's the first thing I would look at after reading this in the features list. Looks great otherwise though, and it's cute how it rhymes with "Coda".

FateOfNations 5y ago
It's probably alluding to https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry which isn't exactly straight forward.
- paulgb 5y ago
  Yeah, I’ve never given it much though for personal use, but I’ve used VS code in a professional setting with strict policies around stuff like that, and “fuss” is a good word to describe the steps to use VS Code in that environment.
weikju 5y ago
could be "no-fuss settings" for "analytics & privacy", not "settings for:" "no-fuss analytics" and "privacy"
- Lammy 5y ago
  Oh, duh, you're totally right. I guess I've been doing too much programming lately that I read those as separate things offered together

acomjean 5y ago

I used to have coda. I guess they renamed it Nova: https://panic.com/coda/ https://panic.com/coda/ I wanted to love (Coda) it but it wasn't good enough for me to switch. This looks slick, but I work multi-platform so this while it looks great, if doesn't do linux I'm out. They even talk about the lack of cross platform in the copy. If I need speed I'll use Vim or emacs. For day to day I bought the JetBrains suite. For a pretty inovative company, it looks a lot like exiting editors. I'll keep using Panic's transmit on Mac.. And hoping someone makes a sftp client as good on linux...

seltzered_ 5y ago
Worth noting Coda (for iOS / iPad) was discontinued in May 2021: https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-code-editor/ https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-code-editor/ (personally, I kept waiting for such a vision to make sense and ended up running Sublime Text on a Linux tablet pc instead)
Cyberdog 5y ago
It's a whole new program from scratch, not just an update of Coda, so a new name was appropriate.

svnpenn 5y ago

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

api 5y ago
Their ecosystem seems very web-centric.
- lawtalkinghuman 5y ago
  Yep. Panic have always made tools that are mostly aimed at front-end web devs. Coda, the editor that became Nova, was marketed as a "web editor". Nova specifically still uses that phrase "web editor". Coda's main competitors back in the day included tools like CSSEdit and Espresso, tools that helped those working on CSS by giving a nice front-end where you could click around in the UI and it'd insert the relevant properties for each style without you having to remember the syntax, and then updating a live preview. All of which seems rather quaint now we have pretty good developer tools in most browsers, but back in the mid-to-late 2000s, that was a big deal for a lot of web devs. And for web developers who are writing predominantly HTML and CSS (possibly with some kind of template wrapping), a bit of JS, and a teeny bit of PHP/whatever on the backend, "it doesn't support Rust" etc. is not a major problem for them.
Cyberdog 5y ago
Here's a Rust extension: https://github.com/kilbd/nova-rust https://github.com/kilbd/nova-rust And here's the one of the three for Go which looks the most robust from cursory glance: https://github.com/GwynethLlewelyn/Go.novaextension https://github.com/GwynethLlewelyn/Go.novaextension Both of these were found by searching the built-in extensions library.
- artdigital 5y ago
  Just tried the Go extension and it's sadly not very usable. Functional yes, but not very usable

wyuenho 5y ago

I don't understand why every editor these days come with a minimap, and many of them turn it on by default. I know Sublime introduced it but what does it do exactly? Why is everyone copying it? It just shows you the shapes of blocks of texts of a long file from ten meters away. It doesn't tell you what they are or what they do, or even how to get there. Every IDE since at least the early 2000s gave you an index or a tree menu or something for navigation, VS Code has a breadcrumb IN ADDITION TO the minimap, possibly because Microsoft realizes its gimmick nature. Why not just get rid of it to free up more screen real estate for actually useful things?

bjt 5y ago
It can be very useful when the work you're doing requires jumping between 2-3 different parts of a file. Yes, you can probably do the same with ctrl-f, but for many people it's more intuitive to have the visual representation.
- wyuenho 5y ago
  Things like jump to definition and references exist for this reason.
mholt 5y ago
With my workflows, I really don't need that inch of my editor. The minimap is useful because it lets me instantly go anywhere in the file using visual cues. Some minimaps show you details when you hover or click and drag. Anyway, I have a hard time being productive without it.
mfext 5y ago
Its mostly useful to me if I’m scanning a longer file for merge conflicts. By clicking the minimap I can get to an error easily enough. It’s also a literal bird’s eye view when I’m reverse engineering something. YMMV
hiyer 5y ago
I've found minimaps to be useful when you're also using linters or compilers - you can quickly jump to the next error by looking at the little red dots or lines on the minimap.

Klonoar 5y ago

I will reiterate my chief complaint with this: it should have just copied the VSCode extensions API from day one and relied on easier porting of them.

jamil7 5y ago
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.
- zshbleaker 5y ago
  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.
  - Klonoar 5y ago
    How much experience do you have with the product in question...? Last I checked it literally embeds a JS engine with a custom API for extensions. Unless something has changed since I last looked... but if I glance at this URL (scroll down to "Providing a TreeView") it doesn't appear to have: https://docs.nova.app/extensions/sidebars/#defining-a-sidebar https://docs.nova.app/extensions/sidebars/#defining-a-sideba... There is simply no reason it has to be different from the VSCode API; you can set up JavaScriptCore to hook into whatever native components you need. VSCode owns the market, full stop. This should mimic the API as much as possible to enable wider extension porting. Hell, you could cover even a fraction of the VSCode API and that would still be more useful than the current Nova extensions API.
  - jamil7 5y ago
    I'm aware of the selling point I was asking specifically about the extension API.
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
The problem with doing that is that you've now created a substantial dependency for your commercial product, and not a dependency that's merely the "requires npm package foo" kind of dependency. Because Nova is not VSCode, being compatible with Code's extensions API means: - committing to implementing every new documented Code API function as quickly, completely, and transparently as possible, because if you don't, extensions will break; - resolving mismatches between how Electron apps do things and how AppKit apps do things, which may be easier said than done; - possibly choosing not to support functionality in extensions that Code doesn't have; - putting control of your flagship product in someone else's hands. So I'm not really surprised Panic hasn't done that. If there were a way to create a basic converter that takes a Code extension as input and spits out a likely-needs-work Nova extension, kind of like there's a converter for TextMate syntax definition files to Code's format, that would be great, although that would almost certainly be easier said than done.

ViaSuffragio 5y ago

jhatemyjob 5y ago

I wish there were more companies like Panic. Looking from the outside, it gives me the impression I got from pre 2004 Google and pre 2010 Valve. It seems like the primary focus is making cool stuff, and money is just a way to keep the lights on.

brunoqc 5y ago

It's a bit pricey.

Cyberdog 5y ago
Like other tradesmen I'm glad to pay for tools which make me more productive. Nova is the best code editor on the Mac in my humble (but correct) opinion and it has paid for itself many, many times over.
- brunoqc 5y ago
  Fair enough. In my case, if every thing that makes me productive would cost $100 a year, I would be broke.
- shagie 5y ago
  At $100, its coming in close to IntelliJ all product pack (I've had it since the Mayan end of the world). Its also quite a bit more than BBEdit (which I've had since If it was closer to BBEdit (which I've had since System 6 days), I'd consider switching the text editor - it looks nice. For me, the price per year compared to products that I already have that have more functionality would be for something that I don't use as much. It looks nice. If it was in the $25-$50/year, I'd be considering it for the situations where I open up VSCode instead of BBEdit for some functionality there... but the price for where it is in my toolchain doesn't replace something worth that much per year.
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    You own Nova for life at $99, it's only a recurring cost if you want updates. Subsequent years are $49. ...Whereas the all product pack is $250 a year to use.
    - brunoqc 5y ago
      I don't think many people don't want updates. I would guess that if someone is willing to pay $100 for it (because the person likes the features that Nova has over their other tools), that it's likely that person will also want the new shiny features every year. Also, I wouldn't be surprised that some plugins might take advantages of some new features.

spicybright 5y ago

Meh. Sublime had every one of these features 5+ years ago. Best of luck to them though.

smoldesu 5y ago
Not to mention, Sublime gives you 3 years of updates for your $99, as opposed to the 1 year you get with Nova.
lelandfe 5y ago
Sublime to this day does not have native LSP support.
- cbeley 5y ago
  https://github.com/sublimelsp/LSP https://github.com/sublimelsp/LSP with https://github.com/sublimelsp/LSP-typescript https://github.com/sublimelsp/LSP-typescript works pretty well for me. They are also both being actively maintained. It'd be nice if it was built-in, but it works well enough that I still have not found a compelling reason to switch to VSCode. I really love sublime and it doesn't seem to be dead just yet. Sublime Text 4 was also a pretty great release.

dawnerd 5y ago

I've been using the VSCode remote ssh feature for a while now and I really can't see myself switching to another editor unless it also had a similar feature. Being able to quickly configure and use a remote server is just too huge a feature to give up now. This looks great though, and the site is beautiful. Wish it was for me.

wirthjason 5y ago
+1. I use that SSH feature every day as my primary way of coding.
Cyberdog 5y ago
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…"
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  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 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. It is astonishing. I too cannot imagine going back to an editor that cannot do this. It has been so useful in conjunction with vagrant boxes, with a bit of ssh_config magic I wrote here that manages an ssh_config include file that (amazingly) VSC will follow: (warning: ugly) https://github.com/bbenoist/vscode-vagrant/issues/18#issuecomment-730614334 https://github.com/bbenoist/vscode-vagrant/issues/18#issueco...
  - Cyberdog 5y ago
    > 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.

chrysoprace 5y ago

I don't mind native apps, but if the trade-off is that it's platform exclusive then that's unacceptable in 2022. Platform exclusivity is such a massive step backwards.

theonemind 5y ago
different strokes for different folks. I don't mind cross platform, but I find Electron unacceptable in any year as a massive step backwards in UI and usability. (Not that you mentioned any Electron-based competitors by name, but a lot of cross-platform big-name competition in the text editor space does use Electron, like VS Code, Atom, and Brackets.)
- chrysoprace 5y ago
  The competition they have to beat is VSCode and JetBrains - nothing else compares. Yes, VSCode is based on Electron but it shows that it can work well. That's the competition they have to beat. If I can't use an IDE because it's locked to a proprietary OS that requires me to buy specialty hardware to run it then it loses by default.
  - spiderice 5y ago
    To echo what GP said, different strokes for different folks. For me I love that it's Mac native (whereas VSCode and JetBrains aren't, and it shows). I use nothing but Macs, and that isn't changing any time soon. Nothing but great for me.
alwillis 5y ago
I’ve loved Panic for a long time, going back to Audion back in the day. Nova is the artisanal indie Mac app at its best. But unless your use case is exactly what Nova was designed to do, it doesn’t quite meet your needs. Like a lot of people have essentially said, I love the concept of Nova, but it didn’t quite measure up. In the meanwhile, Neovim (my primary editor) has really taken off and while some of the GUIs for it are great, they don’t have the fit and finish and polish of something like Nova. Now if someone were to create a Panic-like UI/UX for Neovim, I’d pay for that in a heartbeat.

TheSocialAndrew 5y ago

I've been trying Nova for the last couple of months. Native it may be, but the performance with larger files is not on par with Sublime. Also it has some weird bugs (mostly in Git and in the handling of files) and it does crash occasionally. It's very promising though and if anyone can stick by a product it's Panic. Also their apps are classic Mac -- eye candy but with thought out UX.

drusepth 5y ago

OT: How are "minimap" features in text editors actually implemented? Do they actually have a second rendering of your entire document running, just significantly scaled down? Are they building geometric shapes based on the shape of your text? What effect do they have on performance as document lengths grow larger and larger?

biztos 5y ago

I tried this out some months ago and had really mixed feelings, but I will give it another shot because generally speaking, Panic is awesome! My main complaints at the time were a confusing extensions ecosystem; difficulty rolling your own; and the sense that (as with Coda) "programmer" means a person hand-coding web sites with HTML+CSS and maybe Javascript or PHP. Seemed like they weren't trying to convince anybody who already used VSCode et al. That said, I have had some difficulty adjusting to Sublime's way of doing things, and VS never felt right to me, so maybe I'm just picky. In any case I am happy to see another opinionated text editor in the mix! [Edit: And right out of the box now, no support for Go files, not even syntax coloring, and it thinks go.mod is a media file and won't display its text. Searching extensions for "go" gets me three different extensions and no way to tell which is better/more-popular; and also shows me six totally unrelated extensions, three of which have "go" in their titles e.g. "django" and three of which do not. So... still not really shooting for the programmer market, but I will keep trying!] [Edit2: Similar results for Rust. And extensions have to be written in Javascript, and the boilerplate is all for published extensions which maybe makes sense, but I really want an easy way to pipe ($BUFFER|$CLIPBOARD) to an arbitrary program and put the result in ($BUFFER|CLIPBOARD) with a pop-up on failure, and I find it really weird that there is so much shell integration but not that. OK shutting up now, playing with editor...]

ztjio 5y ago
I share this experience. I come back and check on it every few months. It continues to baffle me what their priorities are. VIM support but extensions can't even BUILD or RUN. I love the idea of a native macOS IDE, but it seems like this will never be something I can actually use productively or ever recommend to anyone. Would happy to be proven wrong.
jamil7 5y ago
> And right out of the box now, no support for Go files, not even syntax coloring, and it thinks go.mod is a media file and won't display its text. I just had a similar experience, no Go or Swift (ok understandable maybe) support out of the box. But I paid for it it anyway since I like what they’re going for and have admired the company for a long time.

stephc_int13 5y ago

Gorgeous design, I wish it would be available outside of the Apple ecosystem, I'd consider it even if I've been very happy with my paid Sublime4 license. I think Sublime HQ showed that making a multiplatform editor is not much more difficult, but hey...

shaicoleman 5y ago
> I think Sublime HQ showed that making a multiplatform editor is not much more difficult, but hey... The developers of Sublime have a different view on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29638810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29638810
- saagarjha 5y ago
  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.
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    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 be improved?
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      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?

p0larboy 5y ago

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

Narishma 5y ago
It may look sick but it's eating battery like there is no tomorrow. It's pegging 2 of my CPU cores at 100% constantly.
pmontra 5y ago
There was a design like that for another news yesterday or the day before. I wonder if we're headed back into the 80s with web design. It happened with clothes a few years ago (very high waist jeans.) There was no web in the 80s but there were arcade games and that front page looks like the start screen of some game back at the time. We'll see if it trends.

incanus77 5y ago

I’ve been doing bare metal kernel development and Docker for my build system in Nova for over a year now.

cercatrova 5y ago

I tried Nova when it first launched and again recently, and I switched back to VSCode due to the numerous plugins and prodigious output of its creators every month. In my opinion, Nova (through its lack) shows the true power of network effects, even in code editors, because even though VSCode is an inferior product in many respects, like speed and resource usage, it still wins due to its sheer popularity and extensibility. In a way, it is the story of JavaScript itself: a bad language that only works due to its popularity; as one uses JS, one continues to use JS as others do too, creating a virtuous cycle.

nsonha 5y ago
To be fair this "worse is better" thing permiates all aspects of tech: c++, java, python, wasteful text based protocols...
- ThouYS 5y ago
  in the case of python: "better is better" ;)
  - nine_k 5y ago
    As in "very slow though flexible is better".
    - utunga 5y ago
      I get why you are saying an interpreted language is slow but given that people use python to orchestrate most compute intense (AI) and data-heavy (data science) work, it obviously does a pretty excellent job of being pretty 'fast' in practice - ie offloading the 'slow' bits to dedicated code.
  - nsonha 5y ago
    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".

crumbits 5y ago

I just can’t support Panic after they burned me and so many other Mac users with Unison.

haswell 5y ago
Are you talking about Panic end-of-lifting a product but releasing a final free build? I’m curious about which aspect you see as burning.
- crumbits 5y ago
  I bought it years before they EOL’d it and bugs were never fixed.
natch 5y ago
Same with Coda. I used it maybe four times, forget the price I paid but let’s say $40; probably came out to $10 per use. It was nice. I was happy with the purchase, or thought I was until they pulled the rug out. I thought it would have long term value. Planned to use it much more in the coming years when I get into some web projects. And now it’s orphaned. Why did they ask for my money if they were going to do that?
- austhrow743 5y ago
  Presumably they thought you wanted to use it as it was and when you bought it.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  Coda 2 was released in 2012. Nova came out in 2020. Is eight years of free updates not “long term value”?
- timw4mail 5y ago
  Coda still works, so what's the issue?

resolutefool 5y ago

Love the apps that Panic makes, they are great on the UX front. But I'm still a bit hesitant to try/buy this. VS Code's rich extension marketplace has sorta 'locked me in' to their product.

threatofrain 5y ago

Another interesting competitor: https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/ https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/ Previous discussion on Nova https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495330 (Sept 2020) [542 comments]

Cyberdog 5y ago
Still not a Mac-native app. The tab, with its always-visible (as opposed to just on hover) close widget on the wrong side, is a big give-away.
- emteycz 5y ago
  Well, thanks for that. I hate this native behavior.
mobilewatch7 5y ago
I’m a longtime php dev using php storm on Mac. Php storm is ugly but the Symfony plug-in is great. My pain points are around local dev versions of different projects (never seem to get docker running) and running tests and setting up deployment pipelines. Nova doesn’t seem to move the ball in any of these areas

adamredwoods 5y ago

>> Nova requires macOS 10.15.7 or later. It is not possible to run Nova on earlier versions of macOS. I can't run it on my old, BUT STILL HIGHLY USABLE Macbook Pro 2011, OSX 10.13.6.

pilif 5y ago
highly usable but also EOLed and thus without security updates for more than a year now. Aside of the security issues, I think it's asking a lot of a third party releasing a new product to ship with support for OSes not supported by their first-party manufacturer.
petecooper 5y ago
>> Nova requires macOS 10.15.7 or later. It is not possible to run Nova on earlier versions of macOS. Nova 7.5 (edit: previous release series) runs just fine on my 10.14.6 Mac mini from 2012.
cercatrova 5y ago
To be fair, expecting software to work on a decade old machine is not what macOS is about, that which killed all 32 bit programs recently. If you're looking for compatibility, stick with Windows and perhaps Linux.
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lloydjones 5y ago

The landing page seems to rely heavily on: - Users’ familiarity with Coda as a reference point for its increased quality - Statements about the hard work that’s gone into it I say this as a huge Panic fan. It just felt ‘off’ to me, like the initial arguments for trying it are “look how hard we tried” and “it’s better than our old product”. This may be an unfair assessment but it’s what stood out for me. Having said all of this, I’ll still give it a go!

koenbok 5y ago
Although the page does rely a bit on things that mostly Mac fans will appreciate, I didn’t have the same impression. It’s fun to see how true Panic stays to their craft and it’s great to have the best native benchmark out there to compare to cross platform (web) approaches.

rcarmo 5y ago

No LISP syntax support, I see. Now that I think of it, I don’t believe Panic’s previous editor(s?) had it either.

KerrAvon 5y ago
The plugin architecture as of a few versions ago didn’t seem to be sophisticated enough to support s-expr languages. I expect this to improve over time, but it was enough to keep me from using the app/buying a license back then.

hankman86 5y ago

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 plus in favour of VSCode. I totally get the performance argument. That’s why I will never use a Java-based IDE again. Like JetBrains IDEs are just painfully slow where every key stroke has this additional lag before something appears on screen. But thankfully VSCode isn’t like that. Whatever upside another editor might be offering wouldn’t make much of a difference for me. I fear that the days of native productivity apps are over.

ihateolives 5y ago
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 you're running JetBrains products so that they are slower.
- dubcanada 5y ago
  Ya no idea, I've used JetBrains IDEs for years and they've been great. I suspect a lot of people have 400 chrome tabs open and then open up their IDE and blame their IDE for being slow.
- throwaway675309 5y ago
  Same, even when I have four large monolithic repos open in four separate instances of jetbrains, webstorm is still amazingly responsive.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
Panic writes software for Apple products.

michelb 5y ago

I like how Nova is getting solid updates regularly. It must be tough to write a new code editor from scratch knowing that you are up against VSCode, Sublime and Jetbrains apps. I think it's going to fit in nicely though, for a large enough group of Mac users to be a sustainable venture. I'm not quite ready to replace my existing apps but it's getting there.

robinduckett 5y ago

I used to love Panic, but since I became a professional developer, I switched to better tools. They seem to cater solely to amateur freelance. It's not a bad audience, I'm just not a part of it anymore.

abricq 5y ago

I was surprised to see that there is no language support for C++, C, Rust, etc... I saw that there are community plugins. But still, it does make me a little sad to see this shifting away from compiled languages to more scripted or web-based options, as for example: not a single (famous) compiled language in the default supported ones of a brand new code editor.

no_time 5y ago
Imagine working on a text editor that you don't even use to work on that said editor.
colordrops 5y ago
They list "coffeescript" first in their supported languages. Is that even still a thing?
- niek_pas 5y ago
  The list of languages is alphabetically sorted. That’s why coffeescript comes first.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Right, why would they do that when it's clear that everything on the page is designed and intentional?
- alanh 5y ago
  Yes, it’s still a thing, although virtually no one is using it for new projects.

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brailsafe 5y ago

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

dewey 5y ago
Maybe something like https://git-fork.com https://git-fork.com would work for you? It has a decent enough diff viewer (Even though I prefer Kaleidoscope for bigger rebases), is native and an actively developed indie app. I'm a happy user and can recommend it.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  That actually looks pretty good, thanks for the recommendation. What I meant to emphasize was that I like having zero overhead to making commits, and vscode does this better than anything I've used. If I was so inclined, I could just use VScode as the default diff viewer and that would be fine, but I really like having it right there while I'm coding without having to go to any other app.
- the_lucifer 5y ago
  +1, I've been using Git Fork for years and it's a smooth and fast native Mac citizen

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

They’ve killed and restarted their editor projects way to many times, chasing Apple developer fads for me to invest in this. I do prefer native editors but will be sticking with Textmate 2. Slow but very consistent development over the past few years and open source.

bestest 5y ago

No vertical tabs? Oh well, WebStorm keeps on being the only choice then!

paulcole 5y ago

Panic should pivot away from software and just make landing/product pages for software companies.

wedn3sday 5y ago

Seems like a nice editor, I would happily pay $10 for, but its not so much better then VScode or Sublime to be worth $100.

evaneykelen 5y ago

A cursory look at the Ruby/Rails extensions for Nova indicates most of them were created 1-2 years ago and haven't received any updates. I will check the vibrancy of the ecosystem a bit more before giving Nova a renewed try (it could be, of course, that these extensions just work without a hitch and don't need any maintenance).

codeptualize 5y ago

I've been following it for while, I really wanted to like it but I just do not see it (yet). It's a huge investment to switch, and maybe I'm missing something but the only advantage atm seems to be "it's native". I don't have issues with speed, VSCode is plenty fast. Otherwise it's probably just struggling with plugins, and tbh I also don't particularly like how it looks. That said, I hope they keep at it and give me a reason to switch! Which is not impossible btw; I didn't like VSCode to start either (I was using Atom for a long time), but VSCode just won on support and that made me switch. It has come a long way, and I have come to like it after spending lots of time tweaking and theming everything.

sjs382 5y ago

I found the headline messaging super off-putting. "Can a native Mac code editor really be that much better? Find out." I'm pretty happy with VS Code, which is free (and before that, Atom, etc). Why put the onus on me to figure out why a $99 editor could be better? Show me. Tell me. I realize that they make an attempt to show/tell down the page, but a list of features that my current editor already has doesn't answer the original question in the affirmative.

joshstrange 5y ago

I love Panic and almost everything they do. I've bought many of their products and Coda was the first IDE-ish thing I've ever used. I love Coda but then I needed more powerful tools and Coda didn't cut it. Before Code 2 came out I had already move off them completely. I really wanted to like Nova and I hope others love it but I don't think I can go back from Intelij/IDEA. Best of luck to Panic in all their endeavors though, Transmit is my favorite app of theirs right now.