I remember when Panic Inc. released Coda in April 2007. I was in high school. I purchased my first MacBook the previous year with my first few paychecks working at a movie theatre. This was an era when Apple Design was still fresh. I used Coda for many years, but its capabilities were stuck in the past. I did eventually switch to Sublime Text and finally vim. In Sept 2020, Panic released their latest code editor Nova. I used it heavily for 3 years. I stopped because I was working on a large mono-repo that was 10GB in size and the editor couldn’t keep up. I’ve spent the past 3 years on Zed and Helix.
I downloaded Nova again this past week. For better or worse, I’m a software engineer in the agentic era. I don’t write that much code anymore, but I sure try to read as much of it as I can. Downloading Nova again brought joy. I’ve said it to a few people this week, but Nova has the best text rendering engine out there. More so, the entire editor is outright beautiful. One of my favorite details is the faint blue glow of the sidebar icons. When so many things are generated via AI, I appreciate the details that are human-made.
Tonight I generated a small extension to fill a gap. I spend most of my day reviewing pull requests. I created a Nova extension called “Branch Review”. It lists every file a branch changed against its base, opens each diff with a double-click, and tracks which files you have already read. It’s generic and that works for me.
You can download the the extension from Nova’s extension library. Search “Branch Review” or clone it. https://github.com/tomkrush/nova_branch_review_extension