I honestly can’t really tell that VS Code is an electron app. Slack, I can tell. Notion, oh boy, I can tell. But VS Code performs so well in moment to moment use that I feel like the only obvious limiting factor is the lack of a pref pane.
Nova doesn’t seem particularly Mac-like to me, if I’m being honest. All the praise it gets and it’s still a super weird-looking backwards app. And the aforementioned typing lag is something I’d associate with a web app, not a native app.
Textmate is great, by the way. Just sharing my thoughts on the electron stuff.
I’m at least conversant in Vi/Vim/whatever they’re calling the current incarnation these days, mostly because I did a lot of *NIX at one point and some of the “user friendly” editors did things like put weird newline characters in our important config files.
I looked at Textmate back in the day, and I was actually going to give it a shot. But that was back when there was the weirdness about v1 vs. v2 and all the questions about whether it would ever be released, etc.
Is it back under development? Or is it the sort of thing where development stopped long ago, but the old code still works?
The never-ending v2 release happened quite a few years ago, and TM2.0 is now open-source. You can find the repo here GitHub - textmate/textmate: TextMate is a graphical text editor for macOS 10.12 or later and see that it is maintained but I suspect the author considers it to be feature-complete so he is basically keeping up with newer macOS releases. Documentation is outdated
It is still a very flexible and fast editor, although I find the look of TM1.0 (which does not run any more since a few macOS releases) more pleasant. There is a more or less active community but lacking things like official LSP support it’s clear that the TextMate glory days have passed.
But you cannot beat free as in beer and speech. For the price I would give it a spin.
Another promising Mac-native project to check out. Rust back-end, Swift front-end. $25 one-time (surely this will go up over time.) Their approach seems to be to build in support first-party, like JetBrains, rather than relying on a plugin community, so right now it’s only good for Rust and Golang though I suppose you could still save any type of file.
OT - Since we are discussing subscriptions and licensing, I thought I would mention iMazing
I find their device license is odd:
With the Device License, you link your iPhone, iPad or iPod to your iMazing license for the entire lifetime of the device.
That sounds nice on the surface however in my opinion it is not practical in the modern ‘nerd’ world. ex: I traded in my old phone for a new one, and when I opened amazing it said that my old phone – now long gone - is licensed for the next thousand years (and can never be removed). And I had to purchase a new license for my new device. As far as I’m concerned this is not a good license model for people who are continually trading in old stuff for new stuff. A more practical model would have been that you licensed one device and that you could delete the old device and add the new device.
just my 2cents
they do have this also - Unlimited Devices subscription
With the Unlimited Devices subscription, you enjoy unrestricted use of iMazing with any iPhone, iPad or iPod. Perfect for power users who enjoy helping out friends and family!
50 comments, I’m sure someone has said this already, but I think it’s fair to say that when you can continue to use all the features you’ve paid for in their entirety forever, it’s not a subscription. It’s just a steep fee for updates—and I’m not beyond begrudging that myself. But to me, a subscription app is one you can no longer use if you quit paying.
Bought Nova as soon as it came out, used if for a while and it fell by the wayside as I just went back to VSCode. I want to love Nova, I paid for the update after a year but not sure I will next time. The promise was a vibrant and constantly and quickly evolving app which has not really lived up to the promise.
Yes it has added a few new things, but plugin dev is slow after an initial surge, and the “new” features (VIM mode for example) are not a lot of use to me.
I know VSCode is electron but it works fine on my machine, no real delays, coming from Sublime Text the config panels were not really a problem, and there really is a plugin for just about every eventuality. My only pain point with VSCode was mapping SFTP when using a Build folder rather than the project root but a Google search gave me the answer.
Like many it would seem, I still use Transmit on both MacOS and iOS, and while I agree Textastic is a good iOS code editor the new Github Code Spaces/VSCode integration means I might when using an iPad be able to revise my iPad workflow.
I’ve basically done the same. VSCode also, honestly, seems more Mac-like in some ways. There are more keyboard shortcuts, for example. It’s odd to me that many folks talk about how Nova is more Mac-like, but it’s still a super weird IDE that doesn’t really fit with OS patterns as a whole.
I agree it does some things oddly, like the placement of icons and panes within the main window. But if you want settings, you press Cmd-, and you get a familiar Preferences window. Also, looking through the menus there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts.
If we’re comparing to VSCode, once you get past the traffic lights at the top nothing about it looks like a Mac app. In fact… I doubt you’d be able to tell the difference between the Mac and Windows versions (given non-retina rendering of both). While that sounds like a good idea, and for some people it absolutely will be, I find that counter-intuitive. I use Windows 10 for work five days a week and my Mac at home seven days a week and I effortlessly switch between the two sets of paradigms depending on which type of computer I am sitting in front of. Where I come seriously unstuck is using a Windows desktop remotely from my Mac. Having a “native” app on my Mac behave like a Windows app would drive me batty.
This is all true. Unfortunately, I’ve found Nova to be extremely buggy in ways that VSCode just isn’t. Sublime Text is also bug-free for me. But Nova has caused much consternation with my work. I open it every couple months to see if they’ve made progress, and every time the same bugs persist — even the ones that were “fixed” in updates since then!
I also just cancelled my recurring subscription to Nova because it hasn’t progressed and has lots of annoying niggles. I’ve switched back to WebStorm and PHP Storm, which I’ve been using for years and find rock solid. I like VS Code but prefer the code completion and debugging in JetBrains IDEs.
