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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Nova is absolutely gorgeous. I'm so done with Electron apps, even ones "done well". There's a lot to be said for fast, native apps that look and feel like they belong on the platform you're running them on.

That said, Nova's Python support wasn't in the ballpark of VS Code's. But testing it for a while soured me on VS Code, and I ended up switching back to Emacs (which has outstanding Python support via LSP these days).

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Unfortunately Nova didn't work on a large project for me with a lot of generated type definitions. It was a gigantic mobx project and that would make Nova really really slow to the point of being unusable. Somehow VSCode could still work with that.

Yeah this sort of thing was my experience as well. Despite being Electron, VS Code is faster and smoother for the main project I work on. Which sucks because I would love to use Nova more (I’ve owned it for over a year now).

I forget the exact details, but I also had problems getting things like Black, mypy, flake8, isort, etc. running. VS Code is really good about making that all work with minimal effort. Emacs is a bit more effort, but it's flawless with a tiny bit of tweaking. I never was able to get the same results out of Nova, and that's what ultimately pushed me away.

I don't have anything bad to say about Nova, except that I personally didn't find it to be a great Python environment. Maybe it's brilliant for other languages? I hope so, because it's really pleasant and I'd like to see it succeed!

When Nova first came out I wrote a small extension [0] to provide an autopep8 formatting, but there is too much manual management on the user's end. Since there is no API to manage extension dependencies, the user has to manually install and specify the path to where `autopep8` is, which to my mind is a lot of friction.

Compare that to VSCode, where there is a whole API [1] for formatting extensions!

[0]: https://github.com/ReagentX/Nova-autopep8

[1]: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2016/11/15/formatters-be...

That matches my experience. I hope that gets straightened out!

you can have an interactive debugger for python in Emacs with break points and everything?

Yep! https://realpython.com/emacs-the-best-python-editor/#debuggi...

Emacs with EVIL? If so, do you like the integration?

Nope, regular Emacs without EVIL. Nothing against vi, and I use it regularly for tweaking files on remote machines, but I prefer the native Emacs experience.

Emacs with evil is excellent. I don't use a lot of vim plugins but it has all the basics, change surround with cs, commenting with gc, going to definition and finding references with gd and gD respectively, etc. Unless you have some custom vim plugins you should be fine.

Does Emacs feel more macOS-y than VS Code?

In my opinion, yeah. In its minimalism (I've turned off the toolbar and other stuff), it has fewer GUI elements to get "wrong". VSCode has a gazillion widgets, and none of them look like other Mac apps, and is in an uncanny valley of looking like it might be a native app on some system I don't use. Emacs is definitely off on its own direction, but at first glance looks a lot like TextEdit, minus the toolbars. It's just a large text input waiting for me to start typing.

Agreed

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