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Comment by lekevicius | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy to see them try, but rationally, I just don't understand why Panic is even trying. The trade-offs are just too steep. They won't ever have the ecosystem of open-source, Electron-based editors. And whatever you gain from being mac-native is just not enough of a benefit for almost all development.

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IMHO they should pivot it into a beautiful native or electron UI for neovim. Rebuilding all the LSP, task, etc. stuff in a bespoke editor is clearly a ton of work and maybe not paying off in the long run. Get all that stuff for free from neovim. Make a plugin that starts users off in a more familiar mode-less editing experience so the switch isn't noticeable.

You might be interested in Onivim then (https://onivim.io/)

Edit: Ah it seems they actually ran out of money. I'd assume the project is deprecated now as I don't see any updates in the recent past.

https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/3811#issuecomment-9103...

It's exactly what I'm thinking of but development on it has stopped and it isn't clear if there's a future for it (see the update here: https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/3811).

I'd love to see a company like Panic put some dollars and development power behind a native UI for neovim. Neovim is built explicitly to support these kind of custom frontend UIs. It's basically a backend for a fully-featured text editor and IDE but with a minimal console only frontend UI.

Ah it seems they actually ran out of money. I'd assume the project is deprecated now as I don't see any updates in the recent past.

https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/3811#issuecomment-9103...

Onivim is not vim or even neovim. neovim + VSCode extensions doesn’t really work as well as it should, and the configuration story (to me) was a nightmare.

There aren’t many software purchases I regret, but this is one of them. (I’d never ask for a refund, because I paid for _access_. I just didn’t like what I paid for.)

I want this to be wrong so badly, but I grudgingly admit it to be true.

I want the native app from a boutique software shop to somehow be better than the open-source alternatives.

Absolutely. Also, I want a small company to succeed against Big Tech (VSCode) and Big Dog (JetBrains).

> I want the native app from a boutique software shop to somehow be better than the open-source alternatives.

In a very loose sense, it already is. The apps I’ve seen it compared with in this thread are VSCode and Emacs. The former has the backing of onenof the largest corporations in the world, and the latter has 40 years of development time put it it. That you can even use Nova, Emacs and VsCode in the same sentence, despite Nova being two-four years old and only have a small core dev team is really impressive.

I think the takeaway is that an new editor has to be a platform, not just an app. Emacs was an OS for running Lisp code from the beginning, and it was trivially easy for end users who weren't Emacs developers to add their own extensions to it. VSCode has a rich enough API that JavaScript devs were able to do the same with it, and while I think Lisp >>> JS, there are a lot more JS devs out there who can add and tweak extensions, so it grew a huge fan base quickly.

Nova has a JS-based extension API as well.

Right, and I think that's what makes it viable at all. A similarly pretty editor without an API would be a non-starter, at least to me. It's not that hard to make something that can let you edit syntax highlighted text. Well, I couldn't do it, but judging by the number of working text editors on the planet, it seems like there are plenty of people who can. I think the more important part is that other people can make it act like they want it to, and without having to patch the editors internal code themselves.

Some of us learned Lisp and really hated it too.

TypeScript, though? TypeScript I love.

No argument from me. I prefer Lisp, but hey, we all have preferences. What I meant was that regardless of preference, there are a lot more JS users than Lisp users these days, so leveraging that as an extension language makes a lot of sense for new editors (even though it means I'm personally less likely to make an extension for it).

Not everyone lives on the SV scale-at-all-costs treadmill.

Some people are happy building quality tools for a discerning audience.

That's pretty much what Panic has been doing for the last 20+ years.

I understand that, and I've been buying their software for at least 10+ years, starting with CandyBar.

My point is, for the effort it requires, I don't see it paying off. I would bet money that Nova will be discontinued in less than 5 years, while VS Code will not.

If we put aside get-rich-quick options, if they are breaking even, for some value of breaking even, then why not?.. But you're right it doesn't seem to be sustainable long term with a wealth of free options available.

Perhaps you and the people at Panic have different definitions of "paying off."

Keeping a company afloat, bring proud of your work, working with a good group of people, and providing for one's family sound like pretty good payoffs to me.

Much better than obsessing over all the things that FAANG-types talk about on HN: What "level" engineer I am, pre-counting stock options (fake money) before vesting, or worrying about whether the project I work on will be cancelled because it "only" makes $10 million profit a year.

It seems pretty likely they will either continue to develop Nova, or replace it with a newer app, indefinitely. They’ve been consistently shipping a code editor (Coda until 2020, now replaced with Nova) since 2007. Apart from uncharacteristically losing interest, I think the only reason they’d stop developing Nova or some spiritual successor is becoming unsustainable as a business. Fortunately for Panic, there are still a lot of Mac users who are happy to pay for quality native apps.

Coda was quite dead before relaunch as Nova. Even if not outright discontinued, if Nova got to the stage Coda 3 was, that would not be great.

I mean, ‘they stopped releasing to go back and do it better’ doesn’t feel less dedicated.

I totally agree. There are multiple definitions of success, and "we became the most popular <blank>" is just one. It doesn't say anything less of someone that they don't reach that goal, or don't set it in the first place.

Panic is pretty much exactly a “Native MacOS” company. It’s in their blood, it’s in their history.

i find electron-based editors to be subpar compared to an IDE like intellij idea. if nova's target is a full blown IDE like idea then for sure there's a market.

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