Nova

Name: Nova
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)

The beautiful, fast, flexible, native Mac code editor from Panic.

Paid • Proprietary
Code Editor
Mac

What is Nova?

If we're being honest, Mac apps are a bit of a lost art.

There are great reasons to make cross-platform apps — to start, they're cross-platform — but it's just not who we are. Founded as a Mac software company in 1997, our joy at Panic comes from building things that feel truly, well, Mac-like.

Long ago, we created Coda, an all-in-one Mac web editor that broke new ground. But when we started work on Nova, we looked at where the web was today, and where we needed to be. It was time for a fresh start.

It's new, hyper-fast, and flexible, with all the features you want: smart autocomplete, multiple cursors, a Minimap, editor overscroll, tag pairs and brackets, and way, way more.

For the curious, Nova has built-in support for CoffeeScript, CSS, Diff, ERB, Haml, HTML, INI, JavaScript, JSON, JSX, Less, Lua, Markdown, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Sass, SCSS, Smarty, SQL, TSX, TypeScript, XML, and YAML.

It's also very expandable, with a robust API and a built-in extension browser.

(Here's a little editor story for fun. During beta we found some bugs in Apple's text layout engine that we just could not fix. Our solution? Writing our own text layout manager… from scratch. Not only did this fix the bugs, but it also boosted our editor's performance. We're not messing around!)

But even the best text engine in the world means nothing unless you actually enjoy spending your time in the app. So, how does Nova look?

You can make Nova look exactly the way you want, while still feeling Mac-like. Bright, dark, cyberpunk, it's all you. Plus, themes are CSS-like and easy to write. Nova can even automatically change your theme when your Mac switches from light to dark mode.

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Supported Languages

English

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gwynethllewelyn

★

• Top positive comment ago • 0 replies

Disclaimer: as mentioned, I did officially participate in the closed beta testing phase. I do not work for Panic, nor am I paid by them for anything (in fact, my current license for Nova had to be bought from them — they didn't even reward or acknowledge their beta testers in any way, except with a big 'thnkk you'). I was also a former user of Nova's direct predecessor, Coda (and later Coda 2). As such, I'm biased towards Panic's products. I do have other code editors installed on my Mac — but mostly because I forgot to delete them... — so it's not a surprise if I've been so happy with Nova: Panic never disappoints, and that's why their products still enjoy popularity: you can argue as much as you wish, but, at the end of the day, what matters is if you get plenty of 'bang for the buck' — which certainly happens with all Panic products, and Nova is not an exception here...

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