Nova Review: Panic’s Code Editor Demonstrates Why Mac-Like Design Matters | Hacker News Reader

Nova Review: Panic’s Code Editor Demonstrates Why Mac-Like Design Matters

macstories.net

18 pointsingve10 comments

I like Nova, a lot.

But I think the critical mistake it makes is not copying the VSCode extension API 1:1. I don't think Nova has the spread/appeal to cause people to develop (complete, high quality) extensions.

The core editor is important, sure, but the extensions for VSCode make it what it is for many people. When your implementation story for them is rougher, it's going to suffer.

I wound up just sticking to my old-school Vim workflow due to the above. shrug

Ugh. I can see where you’re coming as a matter of practicality but I’m really not fond of this “conform to VS Code for everything” mentality. I’ve noticed that the trend has been to move toward LSP for everything having to do with text editor / IDE architecture and while I understand the appeal in having a set of standards for something that has traditionally been all over the place (cue Vim vs. Emacs flame wars - I like both), I am personally not sold on Microsoft’s design here. I won’t go into too much detail as I don’t want to derail this thread, but “overengineered yet woefully nearsighted” is how I might describe it.

VS Code is a wonderful piece of software and if it works for you, that’s great. But not everyone likes VS Code or the design choices that led to it. Software makers shouldn’t be criticized for wanting to break away from those choices entirely and do something new or different. That may very well mean less community support or third party extensions - but every piece of software doesn’t need to be the most popular to be impactful. You probably won’t find a lot of developers coding in Light Table these days but when it was first released back in 2012 it brought some new and interesting ideas to the IDE space; I want more of that, not less.

I didn’t say I liked the VSCode model - I simply don’t care, and want the extensions to work.

Panic wants to sell a product that doesn’t have modern legs - a text editor simply isn’t too remarkable in 2020, although Panic sets a high experience bar. The extensions matter and the product is less without them. I think it’s totally fair to criticize.

That’s fair. I suppose the fact that Nova is proprietary, pay-to-use software that only runs on macOS gives that criticism more merit. And sure, a text editor on its own isn’t all that groundbreaking. I guess my point is that I hope developers don’t settle on VS Code as the be all end all of editors / IDEs. Development tools, as a class of software, are incredibly important and there’s still plenty of innovation to be had in this space.

> My code editor is the app I use more than any other. I spend hours in it nearly every day [...]

> One of my main frustrations [...] is that none of them are Mac-assed Mac apps.

> You can see a microcosm of this fact just by looking at the preferences of these apps.

> That’s not to say that these code editors are bad. They all accomplish incredible things and are vital tools in the software engineering ecosystem. They just aren’t Mac-like, and for a very long time, that has been the sad state of affairs. If you’re a software engineer with Mac design sensibilities, you’re probably going to have to compromise.

I like well designed Mac-apps, but not more so than an app that's more productive for whatever reason that I spend hours every day in. I'm glad that there's a Mac version of these portable IDEs and editors. I use a lot of languages and edit many file types, the availability of good plugins probably matters most after getting the basic keyboard/mouse stuff done well enough. I'm a software engineer >> Mac design sensibilities.

I really liked Coda in the past. Made me start coding for real before switching to Sublime Text.

I keep an eye on Nova and I'm thankful to the author of this article for mentioning the theme I made for it [1].

1 : https://extensions.panic.com/extensions/kinoute/kinoute.Hiva...

Super weird article. Feels like they just had to write something that makes non native apps look worse by comparing Nova to all of them and then only pit their collected downsides to Nova's upsides.

Also long descriptions of features that seem absolutely standard. Most of it read like an introduction to modern editors/IDE-lites.

Nova _is_ nice but as a longtime Sublime Text user I still prefer the latter (and yes, I paid for both). Nova just doesn’t feel right to me, ironically.

I want to move to it, please add vim movements

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