Struggling with Nova

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Hey gang, I’m struggling. I’ve been a Mac user for almost 25 years, and I started very early with Panic software. My web dev toolset has included Transmit, and then Coda, then Coda 2 (day 1 purchase), to Nova (day 1 purchase). I was an early beta user, I provided tons of feedback, and I’ve paid for it every renewal since release. I also own Prompt, Transmit 5, many apps both current and former, and a Playdate. So I truly root for Panic.

But… I emailed support on December 26. Here’s my email:

Hi team,

I’m stumped. I’ve been a Nova user since the early beta period. After I updated to 15.2 - which may not be related, but that’s when it happened - I launched Nova, which is v 12.2, and couldn’t connect to my most used SSH server. It’s connecting via private key, which lives in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.

When I open Terminal, or iTerm2, or Cyberduck, and specify the server and the key, it connects immediately. When I try it with the password in Cyberduck, it works immediately.

When I try it in Nova with my private key, it prompts me for another password. I’ve tried everything - blank, my private keygen password, the actual server root password, all no luck. When I try with password authentication, it always fails! Here’s where it gets weird: I also own Transmit, but it wasn’t on THIS Mac - an M4 MBP - so I downloaded it fresh, activated, did NOT sync, created the server from scratch and guess what - same thing. I can’t connect with Nova or Transmit, but I can do it without a hitch in all other apps. For what it’s worth, I can connect to other servers with a password, but also get prompted for a password with other key auth servers. Could this be related to 1Password at all?

Before I nuke my entire Panic setup - which is all themes, customizations, extensions, etc - any tips or ideas?

Panic was on vacation and never got back to me. So I followed up weeks later, with mostly the same email:

I’m stumped. I’ve been a Nova user since the early beta period. After I updated to macOS 15.2 - which may not be related, but that’s when it happened - I launched Nova, which is v 12.2, and couldn’t connect to my most used SSH server. It’s connecting via private key, which lives in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.

When I open Terminal, or iTerm2, or Cyberduck, and specify the server and the key, it connects immediately. When I try it with the password in Cyberduck, it works immediately.

When I try it in Nova with my private key, it prompts me for another password. I’ve tried everything - blank, my private keygen password, the actual server root password, all no luck. When I try with password authentication, it always fails! Here’s where it gets weird: I also own Transmit, but it wasn’t on THIS Mac - an M4 MBP - so I downloaded it for a fresh install, activated, did NOT sync with Panic Sync, created the server from scratch and guess what - same thing - prompted for a password with the private key. I can’t connect with Nova or Transmit, but I can do it without a hitch in all other apps. For what it’s worth, I can connect to other servers with a password, but also get prompted for a password with other key auth servers. Maybe this is related to using 1Password as my SSH agent?

Before I nuke my entire Panic setup - which is all themes, customizations, extensions, etc - any tips or ideas?

They responded:

Hey Adam,

Sorry for the delayed response on this! Nova should work with 1Password’s SSH agent, so we definitely want to take a closer look at why your key isn’t being used as expected.

A verbose transcript might help us see what’s going wrong. To get that, please head to Nova’s Settings > Transfers > Advanced and enable ‘Verbose logging’. Then, try to connect to your server again. After authenticating, go to the Window menu > Transcript to view a log of the connection. Please send us a copy of the transcript, and hopefully it’ll point us in the right direction.

So I did this, and within hours I’d replied. That was January 27. A full six weeks ago, and no one has bothered to respond. I am struggling because VS Code, which I don’t really want to use, works well in the meantime, and it has the Github Code completions, which is just ::chef’s kiss::. The only Nova extension that enables that is in early development, and doesn’t work for me on local projects mostly in PHP, let alone remote servers.

I still can’t connect, which means I’ve got either VSCode OR this ridiculous setup of Cyberduck + Nova, which is not comfortable and breaks the workflow. And it’s only broken on ONE of the Macs I use, my home Mac, which gets a ton of use. I want to use Nova, but the team doesn’t appear to be interested in helping me, which makes me think I should not be paying for a renewal, especially since the features I need aren’t there.

  1. Has anyone had any luck with Panic actually supporting them via email?
  2. Has anyone experienced anything like this before? I’m just out of ideas.

Thank you!

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Thanks for posting, Adam! Misery loves company! I first reached out to them about my Keychain Access issues in early Sept last year. They helped me until Sept 30th and then went silent. 5 months now! Crazy.

The one difference between your issues and mine is that I’m prompted for credentials, which is annoying, but they always work after a couple of attempts.

I’m a big Panic fan so def disappointed they are treating us like this.

Search r.e.d.d.i.t for my post: “nova_keychain_access_not_working_since_move_to_m3”. This forum won’t let me include a link to it.

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Before the release of Nova 12, the developers seemed to have vanished into thin air. The gap between versions 11 and 12 was massive, and Panic provided absolutely no updates. After the topic was raised on the forum, the developers promised to improve communication with users, but it’s clearly not working. The forum is overrun by spambots, plugin developers can’t expect any responses, the community is neglected, and the promise of greater transparency and communication remains unfulfilled. I still check in occasionally, but I’ve given up hope that the promises will ever be kept, and I no longer use Nova at all. The support is at a tragic level - practically nonexistent. And we’re talking about a paid product! This looks like outright disregard for the community, and Panic would be better off either handing the project over to the community or abandoning it entirely - at least then we’d have 100% clarity on where things stand.

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would be cool of Panic to reiterate their commitment to Nova or share a larger roadmap. it’s my favorite editor and I continue to use it despite it’s shortcomings, but I’m starting to feel like maybe I’m more committed to Nova than Panic is :sweat_smile:.

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I think the reality is that selling a developer tool like this that tries to effectively compete with open source polyglot editors is in for a difficult path. I’m a very long time Mac user and what originally attracted me to Coda (then Nova) was a native macOS interface. But they just can’t keep up on the features.

I have moved on to Zed and it has been a very good experience even for such a young project. It is sort of macOS native. It is written in Rust and they have a done a very good job with their own graphics engine that uses the GPU. It really feels right at home on the Mac and as a Linux user as well, fits very nicely there too. It has a massively smaller footprint than VS Code and is much more refined. It uses tree sitter and LSP to handle just about any language you want (PHP included). I do Rust, Ruby, and Go in it. It has SSH remoting built-in and I can confirm it is totally happy with 1Password SSH agent - that’s what I use.

Panic as a company seems to be much more interested in games these days and that’s fine. They aren’t the only editor that isn’t making the jump to the AI era. My other favorite was always BBEdit and the LSP implementation is not good (and there is really no AI integration to speak of). Even Xcode seems way behind on all this.

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imo it’s misguided to think Nova is intended to compete directly with the open source apps—it’s very difficult for any company or project to compete with VS Code; there’s just so many features they’ve baked in there and have virtually unlimited resources. i think the intention is to deliver on those MVP features in a clean native wrapper, but i think they’re struggling a bit but it feels sooo close!

i also use Zed, and by comparison the only thing i really miss when using Nova is reliable TS, Eslint, and Copilot

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The way I see it, there are several issues.

  1. By its own admission, Panic has precisely one person working on Nova. This is just silly for a project of its size.
  2. Panic is pivoting to being a video game company.
  3. Extreme naval-gazing. Panic’s most recent efforts appear to be in putting out bumper stickers and having garage sales. That was fine back in 2010, when you could dress like a lumberjack at work, and hipsters still roamed the earth. But we’re in a different era now and people expect different things.

I’m still Nova-first. But more and more I have to fire up VSCodium (VSCode is prohibited) to get certain things done, and I don’t like it at all.

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Personally, I don’t expect Nova to compete with VSCode - that’s unrealistic. However, I’d like LSP to work reliably, ideally like Zed, without requiring manual installation of language servers for the most popular languages. The most popular extension adding TypeScript support is no longer maintained - the author has archived the repository. I expect Nova to have the quality of a paid product - it doesn’t need to have grand ambitions, but it should be stable and work correctly. And for the love of god, Panic needs to change its approach to community communication because it feels like they’re mentally stuck in the 1990s.

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Hello guys,
I don’t think Panic is seriously interested in Nova development these days. I’m also was the one who has bought Panic apps since 2009–not only on Mac–I’ve had almost all the iOS apps they develops. Now they are mostly fixing their bugs for our subscriptions. This is just unfair tbh. The waiting of Nova 12 was so long that my licence expired and I didn’t renew it because everything you get is some bugfixing and small tweaks including “Find sidebar”. That’s a shame!

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My renewal for Nova is coming up in a couple of weeks, and at this point I’m just going to let it lapse. I really wanted to love Nova, but relying on a tool that is maintained by one employee at a company whose primary activity is now game publishing doesn’t instil me with much confidence going forward.

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I’m glad to see there’s been some activity on this thread. I’m also very happy to report that after posting here and on Mastodon, I actually was able to get a response from Panic! Not just a response - they resolved my problem! I’m back in action!

In the intervening months, I learned to use Visual Studio Code. Even with the ability to use custom keybindings, I still found it hard to get VSCode to behave the way I wanted. Eventually, I buckled down, and built a custom keybindings file to make VSCode feel like Nova.

For anyone else who has ventured there, but has years of muscle memory for Coda/Nova keybindings, here’s what I came up with. Feel free to use and/or PR it to add anything. Note that it also works for Cursor and Zed.

Go to the source control site run by Microsoft (sorry, I can’t post a link). The repo address is: /sethadam1/nova-vscode-keybindings

Anyway, I’m glad I can now toggle between VSCode and Nova. I still think Nova is pound-for-pound the best text editor for macOS, but it’s true that it just can’t compete on feature set anymore. If it meets your needs, though, it’s great.

I have until November for my renewal, so in that time I’ll be using both. I’d love to see Panic find a way to integrate something like Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini, or even something like a Panic-hosted Code Llama. I don’t know if there’s interest or enough revenue to make the juice worth the squeeze, but there’s got to be a space for people who want the best native experience, right?

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@sethdam1: I’m glad that support was able to get your issue sorted out, and apologies that the thread got lost.

And to everyone else, I appreciate your thoughts. We take them seriously, and much of what has been said here is on my mind. We should have more news to share on Nova 13 and additional roadmap topics in the coming weeks as my current feature work comes together.

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