Oops, sorry, @logan, I guess we shouldnât be burdening you with so many requests then⌠you must be already working 20 hours/day (Iâm also counting the time spent on the forums, GitHub, etc. answering questions/requests).
I sincerely hope that you guys are able to get a handful of developers to help you out. Let me second @kopischkeâs impression â we can only âwatch from outsideâ, of course, and have no clue about the real numbers, but I have certainly noticed that after half a year or so, Nova seems to have more extensions & themes than Coda 1 & 2 ever did⌠and many of those get updated (i.e. theyâre not âone-shotâ attempts that have quickly been abandoned).
As this thread shows, there are already many extensions for the same language (addressing different issues). This is good. It means lots of people happy to try new things out, even starting from scratch, because one can always do better!
Last but not least, during the Beta testing, I remember seeing a comment from someone at Panic which really captured my attention: the notion that many programmers (especially those not conditioned at the workplace by a uniformly imposed workspace) are moving away from all-in-one IDEs â behemoths that will consume every available resource on the computer and then some â and, instead, pick light-weight editors, pushing all IDE-y things into plugins/external tools, and relying on editors supporting some form of integration with those tools. This might just be a fad, a trend, something in fashion right now, but the truth is that if this trend persists, you nailed it. And Iâm not really surprised that even Microsoft figured out the same thing â pushing a much lighter VS Code as an alternative to the full-blown Visual Studio.
As mentioned early, I have no experience in developing things for the Apple ecosystem. One of the main reasons for that is Xcode. Again, I have personally nothing against Appleâs free IDE â except, of course, that itâs insanely heavy. A few times in the past I launched it only to edit a .plist
or similar bit of configuration file that Xcode opens by default and makes a good job of doing of displaying it. Before I installed any other editor, Xcode even insisted on opening JavaScript files. This would drag the Mac down to the point that it was impossible to work with. I used a free version of Sublime Text for some time just to quickly edit files with some syntax highlighting (as opposed to opening JavaScript on, say, TextEditorâŚ); I toyed around with one or another editor⌠until I got Coda I remember that I was a bit sceptic with the overall concept of âProjectsâ, because, well, I thought that I would be getting a huge amount of overhead until I was able to type my first line of code.
It turns out that Panicâs philosophy â best illustrated in Nova, of course â relies on an old Unix aphorism: donât try to do everything in a monolithic application, but, instead, spread out the load to several bits, each of which doing just one or two things very well (and quite quickly!), and focus on how to interact with those loose bits.
In other words, Emacs.
Ok, jokes besides â no, I donât want to start another vi
vs.Emacs
war! â my point here is that, for many decades, old-time programmers using 80x25 VT100 terminals faced the same issues, and the solution was to have an editor which can optionally run all sorts of extensions and external tools, and which was designed for being extended and expanded that way. Iâd claim that Nova follows that concept, too (sure, itâs not the only one â as said, itâs a current trend), but, instead of 80x25 VT100 CRTs, we have Macs with GUIs on Retina displays (well, and JavaScript is perhaps easier to learn than LISPâŚ).
Nova is fast enough for me to use it to do a quick edit on some kind of text file. TextEdit is faster, but usually lacks a lot of functionality; but, as a curiosity, I do have GNU Emacs installed on my Mac as well (old habits die hardâŚ), and itâs just slightly faster at opening a file from scratch than Nova. Emacs is well-known for its overhead (compared to so many millions of text editors out there), and on my old, mid-2014 PowerBook, the slight delay in launching all that LISP is perceptible (naturally enough, I mostly use other alternatives that are much faster than good old rms
EmacsâŚ). What I mean is â nice work, guys, Nova is really quite fast at doing its job, in spite of all the overhead for being a graphical editor-cum-extensions.
But Iâm completely out of topic and will shut up now. I just wanted to give a heads-up, and hope that Panicâs board is willing to get a few extra hands to help out @loganâŚ