It’s been a long while since the last Nova update. I know Panic doesn’t have a lot of people on staff, and it’s busy pivoting to video games and non-Mac platforms, so I’m wondering if it’s worth paying the yearly update fee, or is Panic is done with this one?
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I know they’ve fixed one of the bugs I experienced recently, and it’s set for a future release; so I don’t think they’re done with Nova.
I think Nova is a relatively key platform for Playdate developers too, so I can’t see it going anywhere yet.
I saw on Mastodon they’re wrapping up Nova 12 release, but… I guess it depends on what you need from the Nova. I cannot wait a year for a bug fix or for a feature which every modern editor has. Despite of my desire to use native apps I don’t think that Nova could offer something other than “native”, I mean it isn’t fast comparing to Zed. In some cases PHPStorm is faster than Nova. I really hope that Nova 12 would be a breaking release, but I don’t think that I would pay for another year of updates.
I have the same thoughts, which is why I did not extend the license for another year. There is no update to v12, more than a year has passed since version 11, one of the most important plugins for me (TypeScript support) is no longer developed, and communication from Panic is actually non-existent. It is not known what will appear in the next update, it is not known when it will appear or if at all, nothing is known. In addition, there is actually one person working on the editor (which is impressive) - it should definitely be worked on by a whole team.
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Unfortunately, all my optimistic and wishful thinking aside, I can’t see Nova going anywhere, period. Sure, it may be a key platform for Playdate devs, but that’s a pretty small community, and many folks there are using VS Code regardless.
I really wanted to love Nova, but as it stands I likely won’t be renewing next year.
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I’m afraid that the focus was put on the wrong features (a projects library with a custom folder listing, seriously?).
Nova can make it if it focuses on the plugin developer experience. E.g., requiring a multi-step build which includes terminal-based commands to edit a syntax grammar is ridiculous. TextMate had a built-in bundle editor, which, coupled with nifty text editing behaviors, made it receive awards and a strong user base. What is Nova offering decades later? Nothing.
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Just to level the vibe here a bit: I use Nova every single day and will happily renew my subscription until being forced not to 
For the record, I don’t think Panic is anywhere near “done” with Nova — but I totally understand that different people need different things, and that the lack of some feature can be a dealbreaker for some people/teams.
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Although it’s a shame no Panic folks are replying here, they are publicly stating that Nova 12 is being wrapped up now, and that it took a while due to “big architecture changes”: Panic: "In other Panic news: • Arco has gotten incredibl…" - Panic Social
And to echo @greystate I will also keep using Nova, there’s nothing like it. I have tried Zed and its GPU-driven UI was too much for my (2019!) Intel MBP while Nova still hums along. I have some issues with stability and certain LSP extensions but Nova remains my favourite despite that.
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If the changes are promising, I will be happy to renew the license, although Panic’s lack of communication still makes my trust in them teeter on the edge.
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i use Nova for the web coding/managing part of our workflow — we produce movies, we embed EXIF/IPTC documents in different languages that is content rich along with html5 animations here in los angeles, my clientele base is pretty large some of them are nerdy scientists. primarily we are moviemakers creating content that is navigable via embedded ‘Chapter Makers’ from Apple’s Final Cut Pro, we embed these markers along with IPTC/EXIF data into the movies we create to make them accessible via web browsers to all viewers whether intellectual or those viewing for pleasure (think old fashion dvds but superior viewing quality & custom aspect ratios with metadata that is admissible in courts of law as exhibits/evidence if need be) we are not coding gurus per se.
Nova is integral to our workflow during distribution since they were Coda.
my view is that if i push the pedal down & the car gets me from point A to point B, im fine, dont fix what’s not broken.
for a code editor Nova provides the backbone to what we are doing here, releasing & managing high quality digital internet content for devices globally.
although, if a faster more finely-tuned car shows up we would compare it to Nova. but so far Nova is our standard.
side note,
if one of you coding gurus would develop a Final Cut Pro plugin that creates the website page, for example, simple but powerful HTML/CSS from the Timeline (Timeline - where the movie is edited) we are creating which supports embedded Chapter Markers that navigate the playhead in both video & audio for QuickTime movies you would be zillionaires…this is the future, this is my world.
Apple’s Aperture used to do some of this so the code is there to realize this workflow.
we bypass YouTube, Vimeo & every corporate social media site — free moronic flee markets — to host for our own clients in Hollywood
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Hello everyone!
Apologies for not replying sooner to this. I’m on vacation since Friday the 16th through to when Panic goes to PAX West in Seattle at the end of the month, so I didn’t see this until now. I’ll try and tackle the more general questions and concerns to start. This might be a bit long winded (as I am prone to) but I want to give a lot of context, as folks often like to hear more than less!
Baseline: Panic is definitely not done with Nova. I agree that we’ve been too quiet about it the past year, though, and our updates have been lagging. That is something we have definitely been talking a ton about and are working slowly to improve. But that, and the delays in the next major version of Nova being released, stem from a few different factors colliding in unforeseen ways that in hindsight are unfortunate but in their own moments we just sort of had to handle as they came about.
First, late last year and into early this year I started dealing with some physical and mental health complications (nothing life-threatening, but it still took an impact on my time and energy, and my ability to focus at work and Get Things Done, and I’ve been recovering since). Panic has been very accommodating and caring throughout this. While we have folks to spare to drive the project in my absence, for the most part I am generally still the one driving major feature development, so there was a delay period this spring that went on longer than I’d anticipated before we resumed major work on Nova 12 in the summer.
Second, Panic orchestrated an office move this year. This started because, ironically, we’d sort of “under-grown” our old office, as post-pandemic about a third of our folks have pretty much gone full-time remote, so we didn’t need as much space. This plus rent prices being… chaotic… plus our lease expiring meant we could consider moving to a new space in downtown Portland to build out in a cool way that fit us more comfortably from now and over the next ten years. This ended up taking quite a bit of unexpected time and effort from our team we didn’t anticipate (after all, I’m not the one building the walls, right?). Mostly this was volunteering (like prepping for and assisting at our garage sale event, to get rid of a ton of stuff we didn’t need to move with us) and logistics of everyone packing up their desks and our office, then getting it all unpacked and set up a couple weeks later in the new space (there was a period of work from home due to something with city permits and such), and the interruption to daily work all that imparted.
Third, Panic has had several other projects it’s been needing to focus on due to timing. These mostly fell into the realm of games (including Playdate), which have deadlines set by the studios and console makers, but that all bled into our web and services team having to devote most of their time for a few months. I’ll go into how that impacts Nova, but the web work involved our move to a custom e-commerce platform, something which was long overdue due to a lot of latent issues with our previous third-party solution we’d just been having to deal with silently for a few years. Buuuut this meant our QA team was also all-hands on deck for a few weeks to ensure this new system was ready (money is for some dumb reason important in our society, smh). Half-joking aside, some of the stuff we’d originally planned for Nova 12 and 13 was predicated on the web team’s help (like a new beta distribution and update system shipping in 11.10 and 12), so we had to prioritize. The web and QA teams absolutely rocked their work, though, and continue to do so.
Fourth, some of the app changes in Nova 12 were, as a direct result of my own hubris, far too much for the milestone. I generally try and make long-term architectural changes as needed alongside feature work, in a progressive way and in as small of impact as I can, but due in part to some of these downtime periods mentioned above, I ended up biting off more than I should’ve. Once we realized this and I started to unspool those changes into something more stable for us to begin testing, it ironically took even more time to get it all solid. But I think we’ve done so now, and most of us have been living on Nova 12 for a few weeks, which will be entering a small couple-week beta period soon (probably right before or after PAX West at the start of September, again just due to timing.)
So, all in all, there’s been a lot of timing and deadline bits that compounded to make things take longer than we’d planned. Usually we try and keep at least two major milestones scheduled each year, but this obviously didn’t happen this last year and change. I can only confidently reply here that we’re aware this isn’t great, and are striving to get this back to smaller, quicker milestones from Nova 13 onward.
With all that (verbosely) said, I’ll try and tackle a few of the more specific concerns y’all mentioned.
I don’t think that Nova could offer something other than “native”, I mean it isn’t fast comparing to Zed. In some cases PHPStorm is faster than Nova.
Speed is both objective and subjective depending on how you quantify it, but I understand when folks feel or show areas where we could improve. This might be in syntax highlighting and editor behavioral speed (definitely areas I expend a lot of effort), and also in the general IDE UI “weight” and feel (something which is more in AppKit’s court than ours, unfortunately, but I won’t pass off that baton to them alone). I won’t dawdle too much here except to say: we don’t necessarily see day-to-day the same things you might in your work, so if you are willing, let us know! We’re happy to and always interested to work on performance where it can help the most folks, but it might just require being shown what’s up by actual dev folks in the real world (let our support know, that is, as this isn’t a good place to diagnose it so much.)
one of the most important plugins for me (TypeScript support) is no longer developed
This is very much on our radar. To give specific plans, we are tackling this in Nova 13. Our current work is focused on integrating support for installing and managing language servers (and perhaps other tools) for our most popular built-in languages directly in the app automatically and transparently (and out of band with app updates), in much the same way the previous extension did (just, “newer!” and “built-in!”). This should eliminate this issue for TypeScript and its kin in a way that doesn’t place the burden on the community, since it’s really a Nova issue at this point. When we originally shipped, the idea of managing this fast-moving tooling for the user wasn’t really practical for us, but things have changed since Nova was first released.
I’m afraid that the focus was put on the wrong features (a projects library with a custom folder listing, seriously?).
Poll a hundred devs, and you’ll get 101 features you must absolutely implement. This one, specifically, originates because Nova is a successor to Coda, and our very, very large user base who joined the ride rely on it for organizing their projects. So we couldn’t exactly leave that out! Plus, I admit I use it constantly, too. I had fun with the way the group icons blend the colors of the folders within. But, I do understand that other folks don’t need it, and that’s okay! Just please keep in mind that although you may not use a feature, others do, and if not for accessibility or workflow reasons then maybe just because it might brighten their day a small bit.
If the changes are promising, I will be happy to renew the license
That’s very much okay! I try and tell folks to use what app works for them. If that’s not Nova, then I can only take that honest feedback as a possible way to improve where it makes the most sense . We have to take those needs and ideas, and prioritize what we think will help users most, and not require too much more effort than we can safely devote.
I think it goes without saying, but I will anyway: We will never have the resources of the big three editor teams, who’re backed by VC funding or stock prices or massive subsidization, and who can coordinate and incentivize huge developer communities, sometimes by integrating tightly with tooling they also already happen to control or influence (not complaining here, but it’s a factor).
While this means Nova won’t ever be as quick and agile as a fully corporate or community-driven project, it just means we get to take a bit more time and try and make something we truly care about, and hope there’s users out there that find it fun and useful, too. That’s a big reason Panic does what it does.
So, in conclusion, this maybe doesn’t touch everything it could’ve, but I hope it helps to answer some questions and ease some worries. Nova is definitely still going, and we’re working to be more communicative about it from here and on into 2025 and beyond. If you hang along with us, I just ask for your continued patience. We have a ton of things planned, some of which are definitely bits folks ask for regularly, and some of which are bigger things we are working toward later on. It’s just a matter of us tackling what we can at each step.
Finally, thank you all, and know that I appreciate having you all in our community whether it’s as a user or just an observer or commenter! The very fact you contribute means you care, and that’s a welcome thing in the devtools world, at least to me.
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I am glad that the further development of Nova will continue soon. I must confess that I am a proponent of the function follows form principle. Yes, VSCode has everything you need, but I just don’t like the UI. Nova desperately needs more features so I don’t have to switch editors for certain tasks, like running tests, AI integration, especially with the announced Apple Intelligence, or a code completion interface like Copilot needs.
As a Nova user, I personally wish that updates with new functions would be released more frequently throughout the year. If you release new minor versions with new functions (according to SemVer) several times a year and only one new major version every few years where the extension API becomes incompatible and the extension developers have to make adjustments.
To all other Nova users: Perhaps we should consider together what we can do to supplement missing functions with extensions and how we can support each other in implementing them. There is this forum and a Discord channel, but maybe it would also be helpful to create a more detailed documentation with examples and a best practice list. I have created an extension (Laravel Pint) that I need for my daily work, but it took a lot of time and sometimes frustration to get it running decently. And admittedly, I still don’t know exactly what I’m doing.
Have a nice weekend, Kai
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@logan first of all thank you for the very detailed response. I really do hope that your mental health much better now, I know how hard it could be (we all different but core just the same). It seems like Panic is a very nice place to work.
From the customer perspective Panic definitely have some work to do. Moving to Mastodon from my perspective was a bad decision. Yes, there’s a lot of way to communicate besides Twitter but I don’t know…. Anyway I think that lots of people feel abandoned. Even simple roadmap would be helpful. I mean I not really comfortable with what Nova offers now, I do hope that Nova 12 would have needed fix/feature, unfortunately I have no clue and that’s where frustration is starting.
I agree that it’s hard to compete with JetBrains, VSCode and others but you definitely have something to offer.
@kai I totally agree with you that we could think about the ways on how we could support each other and improve Nova. I’m a Laravel developer myself and I created PHP Test Suite plugin to be able to test. However I don’t think that a lot of people want to do some open-source work for editor which costs 100$ (totally fair price by the way).
I think it would be awesome to have ability to charge for extension JetBrains Laravel Idea as an example. In that way developer could get paid for work. Yes, nowadays we can use GitHub sponsorships but it’s not the same. Otherwise probably every extension developer would abandon their extension. In the end of the day we all need to provide for ourselves and our families.
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Thanks for the update, Logan!
Maybe I’m in the minority, but I don’t use much fancy stuff, and will pay for Nova even if no more updates are made. The UX is nicer than other editors and that makes my days coding more enjoyable.
@Logan I appreciate the feedback and I’m not an impatient person, I don’t mind the delays. To somewhat agree with what @Kirill is saying, my main issue is the radio silence. Even with focusing on Mastodon for socials (When Threads, Bluesky and YouTube have massively larger reach) there’s little to no comment on Nova right now.
To be frank, for a paid yearly subscription tool in a saturated market, with a user base of jobbing professionals, it’s unacceptable. Not all of your customers are here, or on Mastodon, this could really do with some public show of commitment when Nova 12 rolls around and a greater marketing effort going forward.
Not to teach you guys to suck eggs or sound overly dramatic, but I come from the desktop software world too, with a similar style of customer base.
I’ve seen what happens when the rumblings begin of a product “dying”, it’s a slow haemorrhage of users and even loud, prominent supporters of your product will eventually move on. It’s not at all at that point for Nova, but get ahead of it. Seriously.
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I would give 10 hearts if I could. From the outside, the Nova looks like a dead project. There has been absolutely nothing happening for a long time, Panic has been silent on this issue, focusing practically only on games, and the extensions market is dying. As a programmer, I primarily use software that has at least a rudimentary roadmap and clearly communicates its intentions to the community. The silence that accompanies Nova’s development is unacceptable. As things currently stand, I would only use Nova if I had no other choice.
Hello! Great thoughts here. I’ll note two historical things about Panic:
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We usually only talk when there’s something to say. That means that when we’re doing a bunch of deep foundational work for many many months, and there’s not much to report on publicly, we don’t say much.
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We don’t sell apps when we stop working on them. We discontinue them as quickly as is reasonable. See also: Unison, Status Board, Transmit iOS, CandyBar, Stattoo, Desktastic, etc. etc.
If Nova were discontinued, you would know.
As a result of Thing #1, we’ve lived through many “is this dead” cycles for our apps — most recently “is Prompt dead”, as we were working very deeply on Prompt 3 for years before we released that major update.
But! That being said, I totally agree and understand that the subscription model means that we can’t really go “heads down” anymore in the way we’re used to — people need more information if they’re along for the ride.
To that end, we’re all talking about and working on ways to keep everybody MORE updated when we’re doing deep work. Stay tuned!
To summarize: Nova is absolutely alive and under active development right now, and we’ll find ways to communicate our progress more.
Thanks so much for using Nova,
Cabel
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Thanks @cabel this is exactly what I was hoping to hear
Thanks for the response, @logan . I know how it feels to be a solo dev in a company that’s focused on other things.
I’m also grateful that you take the time to put in all the little extra touches and flourishes that distinguish Panic software from other Mac software and Mac software from Windows software. Don’t let anyone tell you that VSCode is better because it’s boring and utilitarian. If we wanted that, we’d be working in VSCode, not Nova.
However, the fact that you’re on Nova island while the rest of Panic has sailed off into the seas of gaming should be a warning to you. I’ve been in exactly your situation. What you’re missing is that management isn’t invested in your project. Even at a company as small as Panic, if they can’t devote even one person to help you, then your resume should be ready and your LinkedIn updated. I’ve seen it over and over:
- Management pledges its commitment to a project.
- Management reduces resources for the project.
- Project struggles due to lack of resources.
- Management pledges its commitment to the project.
- Management cancels the project because it’s underperforming.
- Employee Googles “unemployment insurance.”
I bought Nova thinking it had the backing and resources of Panic behind it. Now I know it’s just a solo-dev project, like any random open source app. And with that comes all the associated uncertainty about its future.
Again, not your fault, Logan. But with only one employee on Nova, Panic is clearly now a games company.
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very different from most solo open source projects since he’s getting paid to work on it. typically this yields higher quality and greater support. i wouldn’t underestimate panic’s commitment here—keeping nova relevant helps playdate too
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