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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

It's strange that Nova would target web tech as their top priority, and not Swift. If you're Mac-exclusive, why not advertise top-class support for Apple ecosystem app development?

Since Nova is prioritizing web workflows, VSC is the elephant in the room and a very deadly competitor. It's free and open source, it's available on Windows, MacOS, Linux, and it can also be ported to the web. And it's Insanely popular and very high quality.

Meanwhile, all notable features Nova lists are default to VSC. One VSC feature that's been quite the remote lifesaver is shared sessions with voice chat.

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Going for Swift means competing with XCode, which wouldn't make sense as Swift is generally used along with the entire iOS/macOS Dev tools (Simulators, UI Builders, Device Manager etc). Not a wise thing to do.

It's the same for VSCode and JS/TS support though. Fighting against a fully featured, free, open-source and well-established product just on the basis of speed is going to be an uphill battle.

There is a big "ugh, Electron apps" contingent of Mac users.

Or at least, there's a loud one, and I guess they figured it's also a big-enough one...

The vast majority of developers aren't hanging out on HN though. I'll wait till there are real benchmarks but I'd be very surprised if Nova is actually noticeably more performant than VS Code.

Just the fact that Nova is ~36MB and VSCode is ~3x that at ~95MB should at least point you in the right direction. Also note that Nova already includes features that are only available via separate plugins on VSCode.

But 95MB is small enough that it doesn't matter—1/3 the size of basically nothing is still basically nothing. Even in terms of memory or CPU usage, VS Code is relatively efficient compared to some other products on the market such as the JetBrains IDEs.

Say what you will about Electron apps in general, but Microsoft has done a great job in making VS Code not feel like a typical Electron app.

If you have 4G of ram and 120G of disk and a slow internet connection all of this matter.

Fwiw before getting internet fiber, a 95MB file resulted in about 20 min download (my reference was 300MB an hour).

It's more about "enough proportion of ..", and my 5 cents are that using mac hardware _always_ with a very tiny internet connection is kind of rare. So not enough to base an argument on, in my opinion. Kinda having expensive mac hardware most probably implies access to some time of a good internet connection to download/update tools needed.

> VS Code is relatively efficient compared to some other products on the market such as the JetBrains IDEs.

That's not really a fair comparison I think. JetBrains IDEs do a lot more than VS Code. You'd have to load it up with plugins to make something resembling a fair comparison, and in that case I'd be very interested in how efficient VS Code still is.

I completely agree, but I would wager that VS Code would still be noticeably faster even if it had all of the functionality that IntelliJ does. As a daily user of the latter, it seems like they have a lot more room for optimization, whereas VS Code seems to have been built from day 1 with performance in mind. But this is pure anecdote so I could be wrong.

We're not just Mac users.

Electron apps are bloated ick but I guess at least Electron is equally repulsive on all OSes.

VSC is more of a memory hog but in use it isn’t noticeably slower than Nova.

Where? Here in HN, a little bit, but out IRL?

Out in real life no one knows or cares about this

Especially because TS and VSC already move at blazing speeds.

React Native for Windows and macOS is developed by Microsoft, and they continuously show how Electron bloat means it uses 300x more resources than Win32, UWP, React Native applications.

My hope is that they create enough momentum to force the VSCode team to rewrite in React Native.

XCode was a motivating factor in my purchase of JetBrains products, specifically CLion.

New thing this year, but VSCode + with Apple's SourceKit LSP extension [1] has been working surprisingly well for me. Glad to have more alternatives to Xcode.

Have been using SPM's "swift build" + some copy commands to create a fully functional signable bundle, no need even for an .xcodeproj.

[1] https://nshipster.com/vscode/

I'm curious about this. Could you do iOS app development this way? Or at least native Mac development using cocoa like you could in xcode?

Yes! The build just produces a single executable. For example, in a Mac app this would be the file inside Contents/MacOS.

You then need to create a folder with an .app extension, set up a simple folder structure, and add some necessities such as the Info.plist file and your resources like the app icon/images. And codesign or notarize depending on your deployment requirements.

Code completion works great for dev and I've found VSCode to be snappier than Xcode even if the underlying engine (SourceKit) is supposed to be the same. The only thing "missing" is not having Interface Builder, but probably most serious projects use code-generated UIs anyway. You could, of course, still make an .xib file in Xcode and use it in your VSCode project. (I don't have a MainMenu.xib myself.)

See: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

Thank you for sharing!

The best part about JetBrains products is you learn one IDE and can use it with just about any language -- Java, C, Swift, Kotlin, C#, etc.

I would definitely welcome some competition for XCode.

Check out AppCode

I wonder if they have a plan to move to iPad their codebase after it’s battle tested. There’s a lack of a serious editor over there, and in particular VS Code can’t compete because of it’s business model.

> and in particular VS Code can’t compete because of it’s business model.

What do you mean by that? If there was real demand for it, creating an iPad distribution for VS Code probably wouldn't be that difficult. It already runs great fully in a web browser.

VS Code is built with Electron, so making an iPad VSCode would require porting Electron to Safari (Apple doesn’t allow alternative browser engines on iOS) . That should be doable seeing as the VSCode ports to the web seem to work okayish on Safari, but it world be a pretty big undertaking.

Codespaces works on iPad already https://github.com/features/codespaces

It was a big undertaking :)

Do people have access to this yet? Been waiting forever

I use code-server[0] to access VSCode on my iPad in Safari, and it works pretty well. There are some rough edges, but (aside from the better shortcut integration and UI polish) I don't think a native app is going to provide a lot benefit because I can't execute arbitrary code on the iPad anyway. You're going to end up with a mostly remote experience either way.

[0]: https://github.com/cdr/code-server

There's also Theia [1].

1: https://theia-ide.org/docs/composing_applications/

I meant that it's open source with a mix of a number of OSS projects that would all need to arranged and accepted to be packaged in an app to be able to come to the App Store.

There has been interest in doing something to have VSCode in some way or shape on the iPad for a long time [0].

I see a lot of "you just need to" iPad on VSCode tricks that basically describe running a part of the UI locally and the rest hosted somewhere else (most fantastic setup I saw was to stick a RPi 0 on the side of the iPad connected through USB-C and VNC/SSH to it).

Codespacets is to me a variation of that, I'd want an actual node runtime powering a full native app with command line, native code execution etc. (a la Pythonista), and not just a reduced interface. I still prefer using Coda or Textastic for instance than coding in Safari.

I completely fault Apple for this, still doesn't change it looks like a dead end for now)

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/70764

Every single limitation you mentioned will apply to Nova and other editors as well. It would be great to write and run code on an iPad, but that's simply not happening. Cloud-backed is the best we can do, and VS Code already excels at that.

A serious editor on iPad would be so blessed

I wonder if they have a plan to move to iPad their codebase after it’s battle tested.

Seems reasonable, considering Panic’s last editor, Coda, has an iPad version.

Targeting web development first seems like the obvious business decision. If building an Xcode competitor is a good idea, then it's still a good idea after you have made an editor that's worth using for broader tasks and vetted by the market.

People who care already edit Swift in their favorite editor and use Xcode for the rest of the dev iOS process. You'd be better off trying to capture the hearts of people so that you're their favorite editor than specializing to implement the "rest of the iOS dev process" on day 0.

As an iOS developer, I think most people start off disliking Xcode but then settle into a reluctant but productive relationship with it. The only things I need to use it for (device simulation, interface builder) are hard to build and yet they're not the things that annoy me about Xcode. Or rather, I wouldn't rather be wrestling with them on someone else's ultimately buggy attempt at reimplementing them.

Many Mac users value a native application.

> It's free and open source, it's available on Windows, MacOS, Linux, and it can also be ported to the web

Common misconception. VSC's most novel/valuable features are not open source. VSC is only "open core"; all of the real value-adds are proprietary and cannot legally be forked/reused.

> One VSC feature that's been quite the remote lifesaver is shared sessions with voice chat.

Like that one.

Like what? The remote editing extensions come to mind (although there are open source alternatives), but what else?

Nova is the successor to Coda, which was always a web development tool. So seems totally logical to me.

Well first Nova is next generation of Coda, which focused on Web Development.

Second I bet there are more Web Developers out there than there are for Mac or iOS.

If they were to target a native "full powered" editor it would make sense to first capitalize on core competency. This editor definitely isn't for me but it makes sense for Panic.

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