WWW… Wednesday! Nova: Native Code Editor for Mac

by Taylor Slattery | November 11, 2020

In a time where everything is democratized and you can access nearly anything irrespective of platform, it takes a degree of courage to buck this trend and firmly plant your flag in a single camp. Nova, a new native Mac code editor created by Panic, does exactly that.

Let’s be honest. A large part of why your average user chooses Apple has to do with user experience. The clean and minimal aesthetic of the hardware is echoed in its OS and Apple users expect a similar experience across the platform’s various software tools as well. Nova was designed with this in mind and aims to provide a clean, elegant text-editor without pulling any punches in regards to functionality.

Nova has a robust set of features designed to supercharge your workflow. Thoughtful additions like autocomplete, tag pairs and brackets, and multiple cursors complement the way you work and add some increased functionality that elevates Nova from a simple text-editor to a powerful tool. It also features built-in support for a variety of languages so that regardless of your end goal, you can utilize Nova’s features to complete your projects faster.

In addition to its workflow-boosting features, Nova is also highly customizable. It’s got a powerful extensions API and a built-in browser to find extensions. With a growing library of extensions for things like testing and formatting, this addition makes accomplishing a variety of tasks faster and easier. Nova also allows for custom build, run, and clean tasks which can be executed at the click of a button and delivers a report upon its completion, saving you substantial amounts of time in the process.

Nova’s UI is customizable as well. Its appearance can be edited in a way similar to CSS with a variety of themes also available through the extension browser. With keybindings, a sidebar that can be edited to keep your most-used tools at the ready, and interchangeable workspace layouts, Nova grants users a great deal of flexibility in how they choose to work. Also worth noting is the New Tab feature, which functions not only to create new documents but also offers convenient access to the file browser and prompt terminals without needing to leave Nova.

With a growing list of features and more in development slated for future release, Nova is sure to get better with time. To learn more or try it out for yourself, be sure to visit Nova’s page here.

Taylor is the Managing Editor of Notes on Design. Taylor is a graphic designer, illustrator, and Design Lead at Weirdsleep.

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