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Comment by ilrwbwrkhv | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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