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Comment by the_other | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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).

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