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.