Panic – Nova Private Beta | Hacker News Reader

Panic – Nova Private Beta

panic.com

70 pointssergiotapia32 comments

I'm a heavy user of VS Code and recently RubyMine (JetBrains does a wonderful job on their IDEs), but I'm really excited about this.

I wonder mainly about two things.

One, how can Panic compete with a free tool like VS Code? Its extensions are stellar, free, and well maintained. The core product is extremely well maintained and constantly improving.

Two, if they're competing with products like WebStorm or SublimeText, again... How?

I don't doubt that they can do it and that they have a solid plan, and that's exciting. Panic delivers on polish and that alone is very appealing. RubyMine for example is really great in terms of function, but it feels clunky as hell at times. It feels like the beastly Java app that it is. I respect the work JetBrains does on their platform more than enough to pay for it, but there's a ton of room for polish!

I'm eagerly waiting to give the beta a test run anyway. The prospect of a new tool to play with is always exciting, and I've never used a tool from Panic that I didn't enjoy.

I think the cost of development can be really low. So just making a few hundred grand a year can pay for a dev or two.

The notepad++ guy has run his freeware solo for how many years?

Panic's tools are native and have real macOS UIs. This is a very well-trodden path for small companies to make money selling tools in fields that are typically not huge moneymakers because of free competition.

This is why I'm excited about Nova. I'm still using TextMate despite Sublime/VS Code/whatever having way more features just because a non-native UI makes me feel icky.

Yeah, it really needs to have some differentiator that VS Code and the like would struggle to duplicate.

I have a suggestion (however unrealistic): speed. VS Code is, you know, usually fast enough that I don't notice any more. I bet, though, that if there was a similarly-featured editor that was perceptually instantaneous, I'd notice.

That's Sublime Text. I've tried VS Code a few times but it feels like working underwater it's so slow.

I'd say Sublime Text can compete with VS Code just fine even though it's not free.

I LOVED Coda, it was my first "real" editor (a step up from NP++) but now that I'm using IDEA I can't imagine going back to something with such a small market cap/plugin developer ecosystem. I wish Panic the best (and I still love them as a company) but I just don't see Coda/Nova being worth it (price or ecosystem-wise) just to have a beautiful editor. Maybe I'll try a trial when it comes out but it just looks... less powerful... that I really need from my editor.

All that said Panic is awesome and the breadth of what they do (Mac Apps, iOS App, Games, handheld gaming hardware) is crazy. I wish they would show Prompt some more love as I fear that is slowly being abandoned and I'll have to find an alternative SSH iOS client.

Termius is an excellent alternative. (I am a happy user, and unaffiliated.)

https://www.termius.com/

If it was a one-time purchase I'd be interested but I don't want or need a full terminal replacement across all my platforms. I just want a solid iOS SSH client and I'm willing to pay (I already paid for Prompt and Prompt 2 along with a handful of other SSH clients that I've since discarded).

Same. Coda v1 was my first step into development, and I still compare editors (VSCode, Sublime) to it.

I really miss the micro-IDE space that Coda occupied – not quite VS Code and not quite WebStorm – and I hope Nova is the same.

Go Panic!

I used to be a big fan of Panic, but as you point out they abandoned Prompt once before and it sounds like they're doing it a second time, abandoned Coda and even Transmit felt abandoned for years till they did the big rewrite which seemed like a big step back for that application in terms of design and performance (100% CPU while uploading on my machine).

VS Code + fork.dev + TablePlus + Insomnia lets you achieve a lot more for free.

Didn't know TablePlus, so looked it up. Looks very interesting, but it isn't free: https://tableplus.io/pricing (doesn't even seem to be trialware).

It's free and has limited tabs (2). But it's fast and works better than DBeaver or other Electron based solutions.

++ for Insomnia

I've bought TablePlus but still haven't been able to pull myself away from SequelPro (free). I know it's practically dead and my random crashes with it have been increasing over time but I still can't shake it.

Edit: I'm not a fan of the updating in TP, if you prompt me for an update I am going to assume I can use the updated version, not that my "year of updates" has expired and now my license is no longer valid and I have to hunt for the old version.

Honest question here:

I was a user of Textmate for Mac for years. I'm not a web developer, so I just needed it as a programming text editor. But it wasn't updated for, like, a decade.

Then I discovered Atom. I know a lot of people who don't like Electron apps, but honestly, it's been fabulous for me.

At this point is there any reason to go back to a paid text editor like Coda or TextMate?

This may come across as glib, but the answer is "if you like the paid text editor more." If you're being paid to program, you're probably making enough money that the cost of the editor isn't a meaningful issue -- so you can judge on the functionality, the ecosystem, and the perceived future.

I've bounced back and forth for years post-TextMate between Sublime Text, Atom, VS Code, and most recently MacVim. (Every year or two I really try to make Emacs and Vim work for me out of some sense of principle; so far neither one has really stuck, although counterintuitively Vim comes closer. Yes, I've tried Spacemacs, people, don't @ me.) But what I actually get paid to do is documentation work: huge trees of Markdown files we treat like source code. And for reasons that I'd have to spend a lot of time trying to elucidate, BBEdit just works better, for me, for that purpose than anything else I've tried. Paying for it and keeping it up to date is absolutely worth it for me.

When it comes to programming, including web development, this gets to be a murkier question for me personally -- but I could absolutely see someone who's learned the ins and outs of their favorite editor just sticking with it through thick and thin. TextMate certainly seemed like it was going to go to the great editor farm in the sky for a while, but it's still actively being developed (as GPL 3 software, no less).

I am excited about Nova. It's such a pleasure to use a real Mac app whose UI is fast, consistent, and predictable.

> I was a user of Textmate for Mac for years .... But it wasn't updated for, like, a decade

Still a Textmate user, it was updated 16 days ago.

Honestly I'm so close to moving full time to Windows on all machines for performance reasons, Textmate is the only reason I use a MBP for my laptop.

It’s good that they’re updating it again. I stopped using it about two years ago.

I like the idea of a Mac-native code editor (although I spend most of my time inside vim or VS Code). Regardless of all the alternatives, it might be worth pointing out that Coda was really good, but that its extension ecosystem and language support was... well, limited.

I hope they have a real solution for that this time around, since I eventually stopped using Coda even for relatively common stuff like Python.

TBH screenshots look very similar to Visual Studio Code/Sublime Text/Atom as far as functionality goes (there's a terminal, code outline, file browser, linter errors, quick command popup, ...).

Not saying that's a bad thing, far from it, but they're calling it "totally rethought". What am I missing?

Coda itself wasn't original either. It just had a high degree of polish and integration.

It probably won't be Electron-based.

They've rethought their existing editor product, 'Coda'. They're telling you it's not just what they have now with some tweaks and features.

Meta but about the design on this site: that slanted line/text format made me super uncomfortable for no good reason. And all the pink-on-black... ugh.

Counter-opinion: I loved both of those things. And love the idea of having completely different themes depending on context (local vs remote editing).

Not to mention the font gore. I think the mac screenshots also look very weird, they seem to have implemented a lot of non-standard UI elements.

Idk if it's just me, but it hurt my eyes to look at that site. The dark background and red/pink font were too much.

Apart from that, it looks awesome.

I get that Panic is a mac shop, and they make great platform-specific software but...

I recently ditched macos as a dev alongside a handful of my friends. The wall is cracking due to a combination of Apple's poor hardware (mbp kb) and Microsoft's frantic efforts to catch up.

The fact of the matter is that if you work on a team, you probably have a pretty standard set of tools and runtime environment. And, mac only tools exclude both linux and windows users, but also people who have existing configurations.

But the biggest barrier, as I see it, is that there's no midrange space. You have the "low end" of free tools, like vs code, and high end (IdeaJ). I just don't see value in paying for an editor if it doesn't go "all the way".

So yeah, it's easy to armchair strategize, but I just don't see who this is for other than existing coda users. Or maybe, that's enough. They know better than I do, after all.

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