(Although I think the program still needs a bit of time to smooth out the edges, plus not everyone may be a fan of the AI and collaborative features, which get a lot of care in the GUI. You can turn all of it off, but still.)
But I don't like the implication that Nova is abandoned or less modern compared to Zed. Nova is arguably one of the sexiest apps on the Mac right now – it looks gorgeous and it's far more "Mac-assed" than any of Apple's software, for starters. And in terms of development / maintenance, it should be in VERY good hands at Panic.
You're 100% right on open-source vs closed-source, though.
> Nova is arguably one of the sexiest apps on the Mac right now – it looks gorgeous and it's far more "Mac-assed" than any of Apple's software, for starters.
Really? Looking at the screenshots from the front page it looks like a custom GUI framework and doesn't even look like a native macOS app, even the folder icons in the file tree are wrong. The only way I can tell it's a macOS app is by the traffic lights on the top left.
You're not wrong, the frontpage screenshots don't entirely do it justice. That title bar you mention is one of the most custom-looking components for sure, especially in the "Neon" theme.
But it gets better when clicking around the app – all the different settings, modal sheets and sidebars feel very much like home.
The filetree icons are… a choice, yes. They kind of lean more into the "smooth skeumorphic squircle" look which is normally applied to apps, NOT files and folders. I'm guessing they didn't want to and/or weren't allowed to use the plain icons that Xcode does.
I use zed but I had to switch to the preview because the regular has an awful bug where the fuzzy file finder immediately crashes the app. I thought there would be less of this in Rust.
(Although I think the program still needs a bit of time to smooth out the edges, plus not everyone may be a fan of the AI and collaborative features, which get a lot of care in the GUI. You can turn all of it off, but still.)
But I don't like the implication that Nova is abandoned or less modern compared to Zed. Nova is arguably one of the sexiest apps on the Mac right now – it looks gorgeous and it's far more "Mac-assed" than any of Apple's software, for starters. And in terms of development / maintenance, it should be in VERY good hands at Panic.
You're 100% right on open-source vs closed-source, though.