I spent 48 hours with Nova, a new native IDE for MacOS released by Panic on September 14th.
Two days ago I downloaded the free trial of Nova, installed the TypeScript extension, snagged a theme, opened a TypeScript project and started coding.
Nova is fast. Files open with haste. Find in Project... delivers search results fast. There's no visible slowdown editing large files. When I open multiple text editor panes and terminals Nova doesn't skip a beat. The native IDE just works. Not everything is straight out of MacOS. According to Panic, their engineers coded the text editor from scratch after discovering some bugs in Apple’s text layout engine and ended up with a more performant experience.
Nova's text editor is delightful. There’s multiline editing, intuitive autocompletion, code hints. The TypeScript extension features some refactoring functionality for all those code smells. Panic found some novel uses for the MacBook Pro Touch Bar including running your npm script at the press of a button, as if typing npm run start took too long.
The design is clean and intuitive, very familiar to anyone using MacOS. Finding stuff is easy. When I click on the whimsical iconography there’s subtle user feedback. I open a dialog and find myself staring into the depths of outer space. Nova is honestly a little weird. Panic is the same company that released a handheld game device with a hand crank... because they could. It's part of the charm.
Nova has all the things you've come to expect from a modern IDE for JavaScript development. There’s extensions for TypeScript, Prettier and ESLint, Git integration, integrated terminal and development server. You can connect to a variety of servers including Amazon S3, Azure, and Rackspace, or via protocols like SSH, FTP, WebDAV HTTPS. I appreciate this feature for small projects. Panic syncs your server configurations across workstations. The nova command line tool opens files and workspaces from the MacOS Terminal.
VS Code definitely has some advantages over Nova including better Git integration, a robust debugging experience, large extension ecosystem. Despite all those wonderful features, VS Code pauses briefly before opening some files. VS Code doesn't tokenize large files because it bogs down the application. VS Code feels out of place on MacOS. Nova UI is snappy in comparison. Nova is a very capable JavaScript IDE. The performance of a native app alone is worth it, but the MacOS feel prompted me to switch.
At $99 ($49 yearly subscription after the first year), Nova is reasonably priced. If you have a serial number from Panic’s legacy IDE Coda, the initial price drops to $79. Nova is a ground up rewrite of Coda.
If you’re looking for an alternative to VS Code, download the free trial of Nova. You may be surprised how a native IDE can really improve developer experience.
Disclaimer: I’m not paid by or affiliated with Panic.
Latest comments (40)
I love Nova. It’s pleasant to the eyes, efficient and makes me love writing code. FTP access is a breeze and everything works “as intended”. VS Code is like a piece of wood where Nova is like a polished gemstone.
This is a funny article. I used to use Coda and later on Nova since many years. I love the MacOS System with all the nice and polished apps. But especially Nova made me now move to VSCode instead. The main problem is what you had as positive point. The editor of nova is not fast and worth 99 bucks but it is slow and sometimes unstable. Just open big JS scripts and see how slow it is scrolling. This is just a nightmare. Just to make it clear - I have an M1 Macbook Pro.
I of course are missing some of the integrated SFTP and Terminal features that Nova has. But every day I work with VSCode I find ways and extensions to make it more "my editor". I am happy without Nova.
I spent 10 years coding in Coda and forgot about Nova being a subscription based 😬
what theme is that?
I'm not sure. I have long moved on from that theme.
@steveblue all this time later, what's your verdict? I bought Nova when it first came out, then regretted the $100 because it didn't quite support what I was doing at the time, and extensions in VS Code made it easy. It's looking much more mature now, but my license only goes back to version 7 which means I'd have to pay $50 to test the waters. VS Code's energy usage (and a few other nit-picky things) have me wanting a native editor. Well, I always want native apps but that's another conversation...
I still use Nova! Nova is a great replacement. The only feature I truly miss from VS Code is the git diff that helps fix merge conflicts, but I think a similar tool is on the roadmap for Nova.
I've been using Nova since the betas, and as a long time Coda user who dropped it about 7 years ago for VS Code, I was very pleased with what Panic brought to the table. Is it perfect? Of course not. But it checks all the boxes I need for my daily driver IDE and it has a smaller memory footprint than VS Code. That's important to me as I'm now using a 2020 Macbook Air with only 16GB of RAM as my main development machine. VS Code runs fine on this machine, but I find it's a bit of a memory hog (no doubt due to being built on Electron). Nova feels light and fast.
I can't agree more to this article. I've went through two Nova trials and loved everything about the IDE. I'd be happy to pay for it, but the only thing that is keeping me from doing it is the TypeScript support — it's just not up to VSCode. Auto completion and auto imports for instance just doesn't work as well yet. I know it's up to the extension to improve this, and I'm sure it's not something easy to do, but even though Nova felt smoother performance-wise, it felt clunky to perform my React TypeScript workflow in it.
I think the price is okay. I'm a part-time dabbler, so probably won't be upgrading from my old Coda 2 license. If the upgrade was, say $40, it would seem like a more attractive option, but $20 off seems a bit pointless.
Nova 6 was released today and Panic! fixed at least one issue I reported, still waiting for another to be fixed, but that’s OK. They listen!
I bought Coda and got stuff done with it, but it suffered from some truly brain-dead defects that Panic never fixed. If I remember correctly, one of them was that it didn't switch to the local working directory when you opened up a project; so you could spend hours looking at baffling bugs you swore you'd fixed, only to find that the local-file browser was pointed at the wrong source tree. Panic was aware of this and blew it off. Not very encouraging.
There was also something incredibly dumb about the editor navigation when you had the editing pane split... it's been so long that I don't remember what the problem was, but it defied sense.
And I also think there was a problem copying projects between computers... again this is half-remembered, but it was as if Panic failed to comprehend the necessity for this; and its iCloud syncing simply did not work.
I think the price is actually fair, but Panic's track record is not excellent and the design gaffes in Coda were off-putting. Then again, there's a free trial of Nova so I guess we can examine it.
As far as it being "Mac-like:" This is such a lame approbation. Using a shitty text file to set preferences isn't "Windows-like" either. VS Code's preferences are an obscure mess, a straight-up lazy abandonment of any design effort.
But you know what IS Mac-like? Misusing the Window menu, stuffing it full of things that belong in the View menu. Another Mac-like UI hallmark is a shitload of floating windows, the clumsiness of which it took DECADES for Mac developers to realize. So yeah, it's time to stop using "Mac-like" as a positive evaluation.
There’s definitely some aspects to Nova that still feel new, but Panic responded to at least one of my feature requests / bug reports and I suppose it has been prioritized, so there’s that. I really like the tight integration with MacOS. Nova keeps getting better and better.
I just started to use Nova and I love how well integrated it is. Visual Studio Code is great, but it's so clunky in MacOS (tbh, I haven't use it in other OS, I use Sublime in Linux). Nova is smooth as silk.
Besides, I think people sometimes ignore the fact that some of their favorite features of VSCode are actually extensions. I'm actually thinking about translating my favorite ones to Nova.
Anyway, thanks for the recommendation.
$99 with one year of updates is basically $50 to become your customer and $50 bucks for a year of updates.
Not being a cheapskate but during these hard times every penny counts. Many of us lost their jobs and are now trying to move to freelancing. Licenses - and definitely subscription based ones - can pile up.
From some of the comments in this thread and on Twitter I think Microsoft has done web engineers an amazing service by providing an IDE that is free and ubiquitous, but also possibly set an unreasonable expectation that software should be free.
$99 is not an unreasonable price for a JavaScript IDE.
Sublime Text $80
WebStorm $129, second year $103, $77 yearly subscription after that
IntelliJ $499 / year, second year $399, $299 onwards
Dreamweaver $20.99 / month
Visual Studio $45 / month
There are plenty of free alternatives including VS Code, Atom, Netbeans, and Komodo. You get what you pay for in my opinion. I would like to support Panic over large corporations like Microsoft. I don't share the opinion that a subscription is merely a way to milk developers for more money. It doesn’t make sense from a business perspective to sell a one-time license and I’m honestly surprised Sublime Text can operate under that model.
If you like VS Code that’s fine, use what works for you. The only reason I compared the two was because VS Code has been my IDE for 3 years. Alternatives exist and Panic has done an amazing job with Nova so far.
It's a an old topic, but let me add my two cents.
I am (was) a long time Panic customer and to be honest, they lack in updating their apps. I had Coda from day one, they stopped doing it without further notice some years ago. Transmit is update perhaps once a year, if not every two years (it feels like this).
Happy to pay for a decent application (as I do for IntelliJ and Sublime, for example), but knowing about their release cycles and having some devent (more powerful) alternatives, doesn't work for me ... not even talking about a subscription.
Out of curiousity: are you still using nova?
Took a year to respond, but here it is! I am, for the most part still using Nova. There are times I switch back to VS Code to use the diff tooling during gross merges or possibly the Jest extension which is much better, but that is about it. I prefer Nova for coding. Fonts render much better in Nova, the performance of the editor is stellar. If Nova incorporates a similar inline diff I will be much more inclined to use Nova all the time. Nova is updated fairly frequently. Panic fixed at least one bug I reported. When I have more time I plan on contributing some missing extension(s), but for now I'm quite happy with Nova.
Better late than never :-) I bought Coda a year ago and used it for a couple of projects (mostly PHP). The performance is good, but at the end, for me it's not really a replacement for VSCode or IntelliJ.
The subscription is $49 a year after the initial purchase.
I upgraded from Coda. Love Nova so far.