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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 complaint

by 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.
- biztos 5y ago
  I wouldn't mind not having support for any given $POPULAR_LANGUAGE out of the box -- maybe there are license issues with that -- as long as there is a good extension and it was super easy to find. Easy to find means if I open a .go file or relevant directory, the app should ask me if I want to install support for Go files. And it should have One Approved Extension, the others should be available on request (as all are now). If there's no good extension for a common language, I think it's on Panic to convince the community to make one, or make one themselves. One way of convincing the community would be to make it easy! (A quick look at the comments in the extension READMEs strongly implies Panic has not made it easy. The updates to the Go extensions are ~ 6 months old.) So what's a common language? You could probably use GitHub to figure that out. If Go doesn't qualify then OK, I'll go back to my cave, but I think baking in CoffeeScript instead is pretty arbitrary.
  - sterlind 5y ago
    I think they're just heavily and narrowly targeting webdevs. Python for Django, Ruby for Rails, PHP, then a whole bunch of CSS/React-y stuff I'm not too familiar with. I'm sure people use Go for back ends, but it's more for systems right?
    - laumars 5y ago
      Backend web dev has been cited as one of the key reasons Google wanted to create Go.
    - m_fayer 5y ago
      When I looked at the list of natively-supported languages, which are not only webdev-focused but also exclusively dynamically-typed, I felt a blast-from-the-past from around a decade ago. Back when Mac-armed developers writing rails apps were culturally ascendant, and statically typed languages and SQL were uncool corporate dinosaurs. Maybe this company is still living in that time...
    - biztos 5y ago
      > narrowly targeting webdevs That’s the impression I get as well, but it’s a shame since MacBooks are super popular among back-end engineers. I would even speculate that by now, Mac-centric web devs are handily outnumbered by non-web devs (plus web devs doing backend stuff in Go, Rust, whatever). I get that maybe Panic just doesn’t see that as their natural market, but I really love the polish of their apps and do wish Nova (or back in the day, Coda) met my needs.
Cyberdog 5y ago
With regards to writing extensions, I wrote one [1] to integrate the Luacheck analyzer for Lua code which pipes the buffer to an arbitrary program. It doesn't put the result in a pop-up (for that I think you can use Workspace.showInformativeMessage() [2] and its siblings, though I haven't tried it) but it does show how the output of the program can be fetched and parsed. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions I might be able to help with. The dev forums [3] are useful too even though they use that godawful Discourse forum system. 1: https://github.com/GarrettAlbright/Luacheck.novaextension/blob/master/Scripts/main.js https://github.com/GarrettAlbright/Luacheck.novaextension/bl... 2: https://docs.nova.app/api-reference/workspace/#showinformativemessagemessage https://docs.nova.app/api-reference/workspace/#showinformati... 3: https://devforum.nova.app https://devforum.nova.app
coldtea 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! Are they? They have a long history of getting bored with projects and cancelling them or letting them languish. Not the best assurance for a long term commitment like an editor...
- dewey 5y ago
  Abandoning projects is something I'd connect with other companies, not Panic. I'm using Transmit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmit_(file_transfer_tool) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmit_(file_transfer_tool)) for more than 10 years already. That at some point they have to sunset tools that are not used by people any more (Like the Newsnet client, from what I remember) makes sense to me. It doesn't feel like they are just abandoning projects because there's something new and shiny to work on.
  - mobilio 5y ago
    Transmit was killer app that convince me that Coda would be awesome. More than 10 years i'm using them both.
  - 88 5y ago
    Guess you weren’t one of the lucky people who bought and paid for Transmit on iOS… https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-transmit-ios/ https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-transmit-ios/
    - dewey 5y ago
      Reading that actually increases my confidence and trust in Panic. It's not an "Our Incredible Journey" blog post light on details but an actual reasoning from a business perspective. Including them sharing the actual tiny revenue they made with the product. As a non VC funded business they have to stay sustainable and healthy and I'm supporting that. They even offered a refund and published an update so it can run on as many devices as possible for as long as possible. Apart from all of that, it's an app that was sold for 9.99 Dollar so if you got a few years of usage out of that it seems fair in any case.

by biztos 5y ago

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.

biztos 5y ago
I wouldn't mind not having support for any given $POPULAR_LANGUAGE out of the box -- maybe there are license issues with that -- as long as there is a good extension and it was super easy to find. Easy to find means if I open a .go file or relevant directory, the app should ask me if I want to install support for Go files. And it should have One Approved Extension, the others should be available on request (as all are now). If there's no good extension for a common language, I think it's on Panic to convince the community to make one, or make one themselves. One way of convincing the community would be to make it easy! (A quick look at the comments in the extension READMEs strongly implies Panic has not made it easy. The updates to the Go extensions are ~ 6 months old.) So what's a common language? You could probably use GitHub to figure that out. If Go doesn't qualify then OK, I'll go back to my cave, but I think baking in CoffeeScript instead is pretty arbitrary.
- sterlind 5y ago
  I think they're just heavily and narrowly targeting webdevs. Python for Django, Ruby for Rails, PHP, then a whole bunch of CSS/React-y stuff I'm not too familiar with. I'm sure people use Go for back ends, but it's more for systems right?
  - laumars 5y ago
    Backend web dev has been cited as one of the key reasons Google wanted to create Go.
  - m_fayer 5y ago
    When I looked at the list of natively-supported languages, which are not only webdev-focused but also exclusively dynamically-typed, I felt a blast-from-the-past from around a decade ago. Back when Mac-armed developers writing rails apps were culturally ascendant, and statically typed languages and SQL were uncool corporate dinosaurs. Maybe this company is still living in that time...
  - biztos 5y ago
    > narrowly targeting webdevs That’s the impression I get as well, but it’s a shame since MacBooks are super popular among back-end engineers. I would even speculate that by now, Mac-centric web devs are handily outnumbered by non-web devs (plus web devs doing backend stuff in Go, Rust, whatever). I get that maybe Panic just doesn’t see that as their natural market, but I really love the polish of their apps and do wish Nova (or back in the day, Coda) met my needs.

Cyberdog 5y ago

With regards to writing extensions, I wrote one [1] to integrate the Luacheck analyzer for Lua code which pipes the buffer to an arbitrary program. It doesn't put the result in a pop-up (for that I think you can use Workspace.showInformativeMessage() [2] and its siblings, though I haven't tried it) but it does show how the output of the program can be fetched and parsed. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions I might be able to help with. The dev forums [3] are useful too even though they use that godawful Discourse forum system. 1: https://github.com/GarrettAlbright/Luacheck.novaextension/blob/master/Scripts/main.js https://github.com/GarrettAlbright/Luacheck.novaextension/bl... 2: https://docs.nova.app/api-reference/workspace/#showinformativemessagemessage https://docs.nova.app/api-reference/workspace/#showinformati... 3: https://devforum.nova.app https://devforum.nova.app

coldtea 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! Are they? They have a long history of getting bored with projects and cancelling them or letting them languish. Not the best assurance for a long term commitment like an editor...

dewey 5y ago
Abandoning projects is something I'd connect with other companies, not Panic. I'm using Transmit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmit_(file_transfer_tool) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmit_(file_transfer_tool)) for more than 10 years already. That at some point they have to sunset tools that are not used by people any more (Like the Newsnet client, from what I remember) makes sense to me. It doesn't feel like they are just abandoning projects because there's something new and shiny to work on.
- mobilio 5y ago
  Transmit was killer app that convince me that Coda would be awesome. More than 10 years i'm using them both.
- 88 5y ago
  Guess you weren’t one of the lucky people who bought and paid for Transmit on iOS… https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-transmit-ios/ https://panic.com/blog/the-future-of-transmit-ios/
  - dewey 5y ago
    Reading that actually increases my confidence and trust in Panic. It's not an "Our Incredible Journey" blog post light on details but an actual reasoning from a business perspective. Including them sharing the actual tiny revenue they made with the product. As a non VC funded business they have to stay sustainable and healthy and I'm supporting that. They even offered a refund and published an update so it can run on as many devices as possible for as long as possible. Apart from all of that, it's an app that was sold for 9.99 Dollar so if you got a few years of usage out of that it seems fair in any case.