My friend Watts has been wandering around in the editor wilderness for the almost 20 years that I’ve known him. He’s used them all: Vim, Emacs, BBEdit, TextMate, VS Code, Sublime Text, and probably any other editor you’ve ever heard of. Some people like to try different beers in an eternal quest for the perfect quaff. Watts is like that but with editors. He’s a technical writer and has pretty much settled on BBEdit for his writing but doesn’t like it as much for actual coding. So the search goes on if only for a coding editor.
His most recent experiment involves Panic’s Nova editor. It’s a new editor—apparently replacing their Coda editor—that has a lot of nice features. He’s been using it since it was in beta and now that it’s been released he’s written a review. If you haven’t (yet) been called to the One True Editor and are looking for an editor, take a look at Watts’ review. Perhaps Nova is what you’re looking for. Nova is for the Mac only so unless you’re a member of the Apple cult it’s not the editor for you.
Even if you aren’t in the market for a new editor, the review is worth reading. If you use one of the “real editors™,” you’ll love his comments about which users may want to switch to Nova. Speaking of Emacs and Vim users, he says,
If you’re an Emacs or Vim power user, we both know you’re just reading this out of academic interest and you’re not going to switch. C’mon.
As I’ve said before, Vim and Emacs users tend to keep it in the family and if they switch editors, they switch to the other editor in the family.
Watts is a good writer and his review is interesting so take a look.