I enjoyed the conversation on the latest ATP about text editors. Lots of deservedly good praise for BBEdit. I’m sure the hosts have gotten feedback about this already from listeners, but surprised there was no mention of Panic’s Nova.
Feels like a good time to give an update on what text editors I’m using these days.
Xcode: This is obviously still the only reasonable way to go for Mac development. In the last few weeks I’ve shipped some updates to Micro.blog for macOS. Always fun to fire up Xcode, hammer out a feature, and ship it without much fuss. A couple things seem slower than they used to be, like debugging and auto-complete, but otherwise no complaints.
Nova: This is my go-to text editor for web projects now. Ruby for the Micro.blog web platform, JavaScript for the React Native app. Nova is arguably the most modern, native Mac text editor, and regularly updated. Lots of depth and I haven’t even scratched the surface with extensions.
Ulysses: This is essentially my note-taking app. I sync to a Dropbox folder with thousands of little text files. I prefer Dropbox instead of iCloud so I can edit more easily in any app, with backups and restoring old versions. I put draft blog posts here, notes about projects, upcoming trips, and anything that isn’t code-related.
BBEdit: This is for everything else. Looking at JSON and XML. Processing large text files, find-and-replace, grep. As a quick scratchpad for code or notes that I’m going to throw away. I haven’t totally customized it like John Siracusa, but I do have a couple shortcuts and scripts that I depend on. Rock-solid app that has withstood the test of time.
Anne Sturdivant Nice praise of Nova, I am a recent Nova adopter (RIP Atom) and also know I've barely scratched the surface. It took me a very long time to decide on what I was going to use once I decided to start writing code again. Nova not only seems polished but I liked that it is a Panic product.
Sam Schmitt @manton I really want to use Nova more but I use the VS Code Remote Dev feature so often i can’t afford not to use it.
Troy Patterson @manton
Thanks for sharing.
I still am a big fan of Joplin, but I'm not a developer. So, my preferences are
- open source
- sync enable
- encrypted
- Markdown compliant
Manton Reece @anniegreens Me too. Panic is the perfect company to maintain this kind of app. Feels like a good foundation.
Scott Yoshinaga Nova user as well! I was able to migrate all of my keyboard shortcuts and workflows from SublimeText almost from release day. So glad Panic makes this app. I do find that it has a hard time with huge files, so I probably should purchase BBEdit for those.
James Manes I tried nova for a bit, but it seems really heavy for being called a text editor. Isn't it a full-blown IDE?
Manton Reece @jmanes It’s sort of in between. It can be used as a text editor or more like an IDE.
Leon Mika Also a fan of Nova, mainly for websites and anything that’s not Go related. I haven’t looked at any of the build/IDE features it offers but for simple to mildly-complex text editing, it works really well.
Manton Reece @lmika I’m curious, what do you use for Go?
Leon Mika I personally use Goland by JetBrains for Go projects. It's a little expensive but it's a pretty decent IDE for Go applications. Many of my coworkers use VSCode, which is also pretty decent for Go.
Manton Reece @ovr I’ve used it on the iPad. I’m not sure I realized there was a Mac version.
Torb @jmanes More than ever, the difference between editor and IDE is rather arbitrary. IDEs have become more and more like editors, and editors have become more and more like IDEs.