The most important aspect of any code editor is its actual interface for editing code. The welcome screen includes this gorgeous animated lightspeed interface, which follows your mouse movement and accelerates when you hover over the ‘Get Started’ button:
The care and craftsmanship that went into Nova are evident from the moment you first open it. But it’s also just an incredibly well-designed application in general. Nova was built for the Mac, and it shows.
#Code writing software for mac mac#
Founded as a Mac software company in 1997, our joy at Panic comes from building things that feel truly, well, Mac-like. There are great reasons to make cross-platform apps - to start, they’re cross-platform - but it’s just not who we are. If we’re being honest, Mac apps are a bit of a lost art. Panic’s Nova website begins with the following introduction: Released last year, Nova has finally brought an end to my decade-long search for a code editing home. With the above in mind, it’s no surprise that my interest was piqued when I learned that Panic was working on an all-new, Mac-native code editor. I’ve always missed its design since leaving it behind, though. I was a Coda user for a while but outgrew its capabilities when I moved more into back-end programming and as my remaining front-end requirements grew more complicated. If you have fairly narrow website development needs, then you may be able to live in the beautiful Mac-first world of BBEdit or Panic’s old Coda. If you develop specifically for Apple’s platforms, then you can - and probably must, for better or worse - use Apple’s Xcode. Software development is a wide-ranging field, so there are certainly some niches where Mac-like editors can be found. If you’re a software engineer with Mac design sensibilities, you’re probably going to have to compromise. They just aren’t Mac-like, and for a very long time, that has been the sad state of affairs. They all accomplish incredible things and are vital tools in the software engineering ecosystem. That’s not to say that these code editors are bad. All of this is as far from Mac-like as you can get, though, and that truth is reflected throughout the rest of these apps’ interfaces. At least there are actual buttons, so I guess that puts VS Code at the high end for code editor preferences. This list is huge, with hundreds of settings all stacked together and a sidebar to help aid navigation. VS Code - widely considered as one of the best code editors around right now - offers this JSON preferences approach, but by default, uses a strange screen that opens as a tab in the text editor despite actually being a list of settings. Visual Studio Code’s ‘Preferences’ menu bar item. You then manually edit the text to adjust options. If that doesn’t already offend Mac users, a common theme in those settings screens is for them to be literal JSON text files that open in the editor. For many of them, the ‘Preferences’ menu bar item is actually a submenu from which you can navigate to ‘Settings,’ as well as other more nebulous options. You can see a microcosm of this fact just by looking at the preferences of these apps. They’re all clearly cross-platform apps with design senses that differ significantly from those of Mac-first developers. One of my main frustrations with pretty much all of the popular code editors out there (and I’ve tried most of them, including Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, Atom, IntelliJ, and Eclipse) is that none of them are Mac-assed Mac apps. The code editor is the main tool of my trade, and I want to be using the best one that I can. I spend hours in it nearly every day and often keep going deep into the night. My code editor is the app I use more than any other.
Each one I’ve tried has annoyed me in various ways, and eventually, I find myself looking elsewhere. I’ve been writing code for nearly a decade, and throughout all of that time, I’ve never quite been satisfied with a code editor.
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