Once a year, there comes a time when I get bored of using my usual code editor and like to try something new. This time it was Panic’s Nova code editor.
I’ve been using VS Code for the last few years and it’s a brilliant free editor with lots of bells and whistles. But lately it was beginning to feel slow. A result of feature bloat perhaps? That, and Electron.
So, I decided to give the latest version of Panic’s Nova editor a retry. I last tried version 8, and at the time of writing it’s now at 11 with some considerable feature improvements.
My experience with Nova 11 has been refreshing. There’s a nice feel to the app, with small animations and visual feedback that make it much nicer to code with than VS Code. I’ve found it to be much quicker, smoother and just a nicer overall coding experience.
It did take some time to get used to the keyboard shortcuts. I did manage to import mine from vscode, but there are still some small differences, but nothing major.
Extensions are still lacking which meant I haven’t got everything set up like I had them in VS Code, but those that I did install do the jobs I need. I managed to install:
- Beautify
- Liquid validator
- CSS minifier
- Intelephense
- Prettier
- And a few themes and nice things
It’s been two weeks now, and I haven’t had to fire up VS Code yet. So far, so good.