I’m sorry, I’m aware that this is the completely wrong place to post this, but before I bother the whole Panic development team (hi @Logan!), I thought I would check it out with you guys first.
I was so distracted with work the past week that I didn’t even notice that Nova 7 had been launched. Mea culpa! Today, I was adding yet another pull request on GitHub, and, this time, I tried to do it from ‘inside’ Nova. Weirdly enough, this got me a duplicate folder on the Launcher. Before I managed to scratch my head, I finally noticed that there was a new version of Nova, promptly downloaded it, and, while browsing through the Release Notes, I found that this weird behaviour of duplicating folder items when cloning GitHub projects was, after all, a well-known bug… and it had already been corrected.
Talk about uncanny! It almost seemed to me as if Panic had predicted that I would have an issue when I tried out something new, and before I even got a chance to file a bug report, there, it had already been fixed… four days ago. Ugggh. The mind boggles!
To avoid wasting everybody’s time, here are two strange ‘new’ (reversed?) behaviours I found on Nova 7. Perhaps these have been reported long ago and will be fixed in 7.0.1? Anyway… I believe these are easy to reproduce.
I occasionally do a little bit of WordPress plugin development. Plugins have a readme.txt file, which is a ‘requirement’ for the plugins to be correctly listed on the WordPress Plugin Library. Its syntax is a subset of Markdown… with some weird oddities, namely, headings use a reverse-MediaWiki-markup convention (probably for historical reasons). Nevertheless, because most Markdown is accepted, I tend to switch the readme.txt default language from ‘Plain Text’ (the default for that extension) to ‘Markdown’, thus benefitting from some syntax checking and the ability to preview most of the rendering.
Under Nova 7, however, the Markdown rendering did not work.
That baffled me, and I restarted Nova, just in case… and what I noticed was that now the readme.txt had been reverted to ‘Plain Text’! Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure that the latest Nova version would ‘remember’ those settings.
I tried it out with a 3rd-party extension as well, the one that processes INI syntax. Because my projects tend to have something like a config.ini.defaults file or similar (to avoid uploading the real config.ini with actual settings via git), it’s convenient to be able to assign a language to a file that does not have a standard extension. Similarly, a few PHP applications/frameworks tend to have files names header.inc which are perfectly valid PHP and which deliberately do not have a .php extension because they are not supposed to be called by the webserver’s PHP module directly — instead, they’re supposed to be included by other files, never directly executed. So it’s not only with Markdown or other ‘edge cases’ that it’s convenient to have the possibility of assigning a specific language to a file with a non-standard extension.
In other words: Nova before 7 would somewhere store which was the last language setting for every file opened; Nova 7 either ignores the last language setting, or does not save it any longer, or if it does, there is a bug somewhere, since this is not mentioned on the release notes.
Assuming that this error is reproducible by others (and not just some local issue I’ve got), I’d be more than glad to submit a bug report via the ‘traditional’ way.
BTW, to reproduce it, just create a file named ‘readme.txt’, fill it with Markdown, change the language setting to Markdown, and try a Preview. Then restart Nova 7, and see if the file is set to ‘Plain Text’ or if Nova remembers to assign it to ‘Markdown’.