Growing the Nova extension ecosystem

Hi all, first post here :wave:

I noticed that this forum seems very inactive. I couldn’t find a link to it anywhere on the Nova website, I had to search Panic’s twitter for the link.

I really want to like Nova, but I find it a risky gamble because without good language support and extensions, it’s outclassed by JetBrains and VSCode. Plus it’s hard to grow an ecosystem for your product when it’s locked behind a 100$ asking price and limited to macOS (don’t get me wrong, this is the main reason why I like Nova, but it hurts the quality of the ecosystem nonetheless).

All that to say, I think Nova should have some kind of free tier / monthly plan and this forum should be much more visible. Change my view or let me know if you agree.

1 Like

Hello Vincent!

We currently have no plans for a free tier of Nova. There should indeed be a link to this forum on the website, though. I’ll talk to our web admin to get that added!

1 Like

I’d say that it’s ‘active enough’, considering the size of the Nova Extension Developer Community :slight_smile: I guess that when you have over a million developers, you certainly get a certain momentum and developer forums are crammed full with eager developers. Here, there are just a few dozens of us, most of which busy on our own projects, so there is a limit to how much time we can spend discussing extension-related things online…

There is now a link to this forum at the bottom of the https://docs.nova.app/ page; I think that it makes sense to have placed it where developers are more likely to find it.

As for the ‘free tier’, I’d say that the ‘free trial’ is the best way to experience what Nova has got to offer, as opposed to testing out an application with crippled functionality, where the juiciest tools would not be available. In other words, you’d be evaluating a less-than-great solution and never get a full taste of what Nova is about…

But that’s just my opinion here…

3 Likes

Related: on the last Tower survey (jump to the“Development Tools” section), Nova has a 5 % dev usage share. As noted there:

Rather remarkable, however, that Panic’s Nova editor has gathered quite some friends, considering it is still very new.

1 Like

Aw. I’ve been off these forums for a while. I’m delightfully surprised that Nova has a 5% market share in the Mac developer community. That’s quite an achievement, in such little time. Congrats, Panic!

1 Like