Nova by Panic
It's been more than 15 years since I took my first steps in web development. Back then, as an early teen, I hacked on stuff with a tiny Acer netbook (remember those?) running Windows. WordPress, Notepad++, and XAMPP, amongst others, were my weapons of choice. Forums and blogs were where I learned stuff. Then, there was something new: Video tutorials on YouTube. Boy did I watch a lot of those. Many of them shared two things: The creators used Macs with that one beautiful Mac OS (Snow) Leopard galaxy wallpaper (it's available in 5k resolution on 512pixels) and a code editor by Panic called Coda. I fell in love. That was the moment I wanted to have a Mac.
That's what I did. I was on a mission. Working a side job while still in school, I was finally able to afford a MacBook in 2012. I loved everything about it and went down the rabbit hole. Xcode, iOS development, Objective-C, CodeKit, and, of course, Coda 2. All those apps (desktop software wasn't even called that back then) were what set the Mac apart from Windows. Being a teenager, it was a dream come true working with such a computer.
But then came a phase where new code editors popped up everywhere. Sublime Text 2, Brackets (remember that one?), and GitHub's Atom all got released in a relatively short span. I tried all of them but none had the charm of Coda 2. Then, there was a new kid on the block, VS Code. When it got released it changed the game. Did it have the charm of Coda? No, still unbeaten. But it had so much more features, was extensible to a crazy extend, and became super popular which resulted in a lot of extensions. Then Panic gave a sign of life. They announced Nova, the successor to Coda.
Honestly, VS Code got all I need. More, even. I'm probably using 1/10th of what it can do. But Nova got all I need too. And it's just such a well crafted and beautiful desktop application. A Mac-assed Mac App. So a couple of months ago, after years of using VS Code, I switched to Nova as my new weapon of choice and have been using it ever since. Not missing a thing but enjoying it a lot. The charm of Coda lives on in Nova.
Even if you're not in the market for a code editor or are happy with your current setup: Please take a minute to look at Nova's gorgeous website.
I should note that I also went down the rabbit hole of trying Vim and Neovim. I actually really like Vim (once I figured out how to exit) and have been using its keybindings in editors for a couple of years but using Neovim as my primary editor just doesn't work for me. I'm just not productive with it. Plugins break all the time and it requires too much time and config to create a setup that fits your needs. I might give it another try in the future but I'm currently very happy with my setup.
A big thank you to Panic for being an awesome company creating beautiful products!
This is post 4 of 31 for #WeblogPoMo2024, the Weblog Posting Month, 2024 where the goal is to publish one blog post per day in May.
Like this post? Subscribe via RSS or toot at me over on Mastodon.