Nova is nice, but its selection of plugins and integrations (things like linters, code syntax highlighting for specific languages etc) is just vastly behind VSCode. Mac native is nice to have, but the feature set in VSCode is so hard for a small competitor like Panic to beat now, especially when Nova is relatively exspensive.

If you are purely doing web design work, I could maybe recommend Nova for its nice CSS/HTML tooling, but again you can recreate much of this with VSCode anyway. When you factor in Nova is 99 dollars this conversation becomes a lot more difficult when VSCode is such a strong free competitor.

Nova has been through several iterations/product resets, I owned it back when it was called "Coda" too. VSCode by comparison has been relatively stable and its ecosystem a lot healthier.

I'd actually recommend VSCode + another Panic Software app for remote file access on a Mac: Transmit. Transmit is mac native standalone remote filesystem access tool, its basically the tool they built into Nova as a standalone, and 45 bucks:

https://panic.com/transmit/

VSCode + Transmit is IMO the best in class tools on MacOS for this kind of remote access work, although you can easily substitute Transmit for a free tool like CyberDuck or similar too and keep software cost at zero.

Thank you for sharing this. I will give the 30-day trial a shot. I find VSCode just fits my needs on my boxes (Mac, Win, Linux) but I am always open to try stuff.