TL;DR: I’m not using it much.
I’m sure my review of Nova made it clear that I wanted to like this editor a lot. In practice, though, it’s felt more like its predecessor Coda and a similar competitor of Coda’s era, Espresso, than like Visual Studio Code or BBEdit: targeted chiefly at web developers mucking about with static websites. (Which, to be fair, is a sizable audience; my website is static, and Nova’s pretty good with it.)
Nova’s built-in smart autocompletion hasn’t proved particularly smart when I’ve been using it, which in some ways makes it more frustrating than not having it at all. Backing it with a language server theoretically improves it, but Nova’s LSP support is fragile and weird. I don’t mind it being somewhat incomplete, but it’s entirely dependent on third parties writing extensions that talk to language servers—which would be fine if they worked. But at least in the languages I use, they don’t. For PHP, there are two wrappers for Intelephense; one just flat out doesn’t start, and the other one makes Nova crash on startup. For Elixir, the elixir-ls extension works in the sense of, you know, not crashing, but mostly what it seems to do is hover huge documentation pages over the screen if the mouse pointer rests over an Elixir keyword. (I have heard Nova’s TypeScript extension is solid, but I haven’t tried it.)
Beyond that, when it comes to the basics of just editing, Nova is…fine? It does the job. But—like Coda and Espresso—it doesn’t have the selection and manipulation chops of higher-power editors. I still have no idea what commands like “Select All in Any Scope” are supposed to do because they’ve never worked. Nova’s clips are useful, but limited compared to the equivalents in BBEdit or Code (or any editor, like Code, that basically adapted TextMate’s snippets).
So, am I going to renew for the $49 annual subscription? I haven’t entirely ruled it out, but, well, it’s not looking good. I’ve been spending much more time back with BBEdit recently…but that’s another article.
