Coda was one of my favourite apps when I first got a Mac. It was such a fresh experience when compared to the dry utilitarian stuff that was available on Windows at the time.
I believe that Panic will create a beautiful product and they have many supporters who will happily pay a license fee - I know I will!
But it’s not going to be an easy ride. There’s a lot to live up to here and they will need to have some killer features thrown in at the beginning.
The hardest part tho will be to make it an approachable tool that can hook the hobbyist but keep them on when they need more. I dropped Coda for a number of reasons, but it wasn’t because it wasn’t a great code editor.
What “visual CSS editor” are they talking about? I have Coda 2, and remember wishing it had a visual CSS editor like Espresso’s.
Coda also suffered from persistent and potentially damaging bugs, like the failure of its project-files pane to open the “home” directory specified for your project when you opened the project. Instead, it apparently just showed whatever directory it last navigated to.
It looks promising. But I'm not sure what features it could add over VS Code for me. I also worry that it won't have the hackability of Electron-based editors. (Before anyone complains about Electron performance, I haven't had any issues in that regard.)
Maybe I'm just an outlier, but as a front end developer, one of the _last_ things I want to do is spend time hacking my tool chain. What gets me excited is delivering new features and better UX to my users. Even a minute spent worrying about my development environment is a minute taken away from what makes me happy. Truth be told, my main complaint with VSCode and atom isn't really the non-native performance of Electron, but all the effort required to tweak, configure, keep plugins updated, replace outdated plugins with the latest and greatest, etc. Seems to be a microcosm of the entire front end tool chain these days. (First it was npm, then yarn, then back to npm; jasmine, no jest, now karma; LESS, SASS, postCSS; Babel, no webpack, what about parcel; etc.)
Even though my current work is all Vue and Angular, with a backend that's little more than a REST facade for MongoDB, I still find Coda to be the best development environment available, and I continue to use it all day every day. Considering how strongly Coda was originally tied to the then-dominant LAMP stack, I think that's a pretty strong testament to the product. (Or perhaps just a testament to my stubbornness.)
I won't buy the next version of Coda sight unseen, but it's hard to imagine what Panic might do that would keep them separated from my money.
What are you talking about? What tweaking? You just install extensions and they’ll auto update. You only need to configure things when you don’t like the default behavior. I haven’t touched my VSCode configuration in ages.
The counter to your position: You optimize your dev environment once, and it pays dividends. Relative to the return the initial cost of optimization is negligible. Especially when with editors like vim my configuration file is stored in github, so I can literally replicate my precise editor's configuration, with all my personal tweaks and plugins, in 30 seconds, on any computer with internet on it.
You interpreted hackability = ability for you to spend your time hacking on it.
But I think they were going for hackability = other people will be more likely to develop plugins. The lower barrier to entry is basically one of the major upsides of Atom/VSCode: their plugins tend to have cutting edge support.
For example, iirc Atom was the first to have a good plugin for Elm lang (elm-jitsu). Meanwhile the Elm plugin for Jetbrains' IntelliJ came later as the result of the effort of two Microsoft employees spending billable time on the somewhat academic project.
I also think this differs from "hackability" when used with Vim/Emacs which does mean "you will be hacking together your .*rc file" which is definitely not how I'd characterize VSCode/Atom.
Yeah. I really love Panic, but given the zillions of developer-hours poured into competing text editors, it's super hard to imagine a small team (even a talented one) competing.
There is room for innovation in the rest of the web dev workflow, which has gotten a bit weird since almost everything involves a compilation step now. Not sure how this could be achieved, but I guess that's why I'm not the one doing it!
Definitely. TextMate was my primary editor at one point, and Sublime is still my editor of choice. =)
But, I think the bar has been raised since those days.
Sublime's been Jon's fulltime work for a decade, and has probably 20,000+ hours of work on the core editor, at least an order of magnitude more work put into its extensions, and certainly millions of hours of real-world use and bug reporting.
That's kind of the minimum bar that newcomers need to approach or exceed just to get into the game in 2019.
Unless they are bringing something totally different to the table. For example, Atom's Electron base has drawbacks but it brought a new level (or at least a new kind of) hackability to the game.
In Sublime and Textmate's case, they too brought something unique to the game. While lacking the raw power and configurability and pedigree of vim and emacs, they brought something of that mentality to the world of GUI text editors. And their minimal GUIs allowed them to be flexible and powerful in ways that full-blown GUI monstrosities like Eclipse could not be.
Sublime was pretty much "TextMate on Windows" when it was released. Then most TextMate users abandoned ship when it entered development hell. Then Sublime went cross-platform. Then Atom came and took most of the cake. Then VS Code came and took so much of the cake that there's barely anything left.
Yea, as an example I found two plugins just this week that have hugely upgraded my productivity:
1. JSX <> Object convert
2. CSS <> Object convert
I don’t use a ton of plugins, but there are about 12 that really make my life far easier. That’s probably the same for everyone, but a different set of 5-20 plugins.
That, and the fact that Intellisense/Typescript features are about all that matters in terms of future productivity gain, and I can’t imagine why they’d choose to make this. By the time they release it they’ll be that much further behind the status quo in VSCode, which is far ahead and moving fast. Best of luck to them!
I think the big difference between Panic's editor and VS Code will be that it's a native application, that it's not using Electron. In the past Panic has really set themselves apart by leveraging Mac OS, I don't believe they are much interested in developing cross-platform applications. That tighter integration with the platform may also provide advantages over tools like VS Code, where there would be a real cost to developing OS specific features.
For me as an Ops and automation, it being native rather than a web-frame / JavaScript app means a lot for latency, performance and OS integration.
Hopefully it also has good PostgreSQL support and plugins / module support for languages / DSLs such as puppet, SQL, ruby etc... and decent git / GitLab integration.
I focus on the usability of dev tools, including features for navigation, refactoring, testing, and code reviewing. For example, a big part of my dissertation was Patchworks [1], which provides a never-ending carousel of code documents as an alternative to the traditional tab document-based editor.
Wow I love what you do there! I am myself crazy for development tools. I think I tried almost every editor available for MacOS and Linux. I hope that the future will bring us even more AI driven code intelligence and context based suggestions.
Figma has killed the whole 'native mac' benefit in my head. It runs faster than native competitor Sketch, and it does it on any platform, in a browser. Would be amazing to have that kind of portability in a dev environment. But I'm interested to see what they've come up with!
I agree. The reality is that electron gets a bad rep because it enables anyone to create "native" application. There are TERRIBLE websites, even many made by very large corporations with otherwise talented developers (cough atlassian cough microsoft), it should come as no surprise there's also be some terrible electron apps. But there are many that are above average among even true native apps (Figma, VSCode, NoSQL Booster, and Spotify come to mind) (Spotify isn't electron afaik, but its all built in web tech).
Conversely, there are some seriously garbage native apps out there. I mean, geeze, just go use iTunes. Its old, granted, and some of the store pages make me think they're just embedded websites, but its also embarrassing given its relative simplicity and Apple's resources. Or go use the new News app. "Native" is relative. Nothing is "native", or maybe everything is "native", its just a word that gets thrown around to mean "it doesn't use the platform's first class UI libraries", even though, newsflash, the MacOS UI framework(s) aren't great.
Electron can be done better than native. You just need a talented team, like any software project.
Haven’t you just handed all your assets to a 3rd party. What happens if they go out of business or change the product in a direction you don’t like or jack up the subscription or delete your account on a whim?
I would have thought peoples experience with Adobe would have made them wary of these sort of solutions.
The thing about "native Mac" is that the Cocoaheads rarely, if ever, are willing to admit that the platform has an insane number of issues, and making certain things performant can sometimes feel like pure wizardry.
The Web has too much engineering power behind the stack to really compete against now.
People already have VS Code running in the browser, so I don't think it's a stretch to see official support (or a fork) for highly responsive editing in the browser.
It's hard to take them seriously when they make claims like this:
> Twelve years ago we introduced Coda, the world’s first web development editor.
It's hard to come up a charitable definition of 'web development editor' (inbuilt css editor? browser preview?) that wouldn't likely cover Dreamweaver.
The hardest part will be keeping up with the rapid clip of today's web without the backing of an open source community writing extensions in JS itself. Supporting the babels, TypeScripts, and Flows of the world as they pop up with only an in-house team will be difficult.
How can you have a chance against WebStorm by not being the biggest editor?
WebStorm is IntelliJ Idea. It’s a full IDE with capabilities beyond that of a simple code editor: code analysis (for multiple languages), smart refactoring (for multiple languages), extensive plugin support, an extensive range of support for anything from eslint configs to understanding things like “oh, it’s an Angular app, let me help you connect all the pieces together”, etc. etc.
I really liked Panic's products, but I really did not like their approach to dealing with a person they didn't like playing their video game (they used the copyright system to take down videos of a streamer playing their game, which is in my eyes a deep abuse of the copyright system).
I don't care for the person they targeted, but I care for the casual abuse of a system that is already hurting content creators.
Edit: In fairness, clicking through to the Firewatch site does say "in cooperation with Panic," so it's not entirely a Panic product, but there's certainly a degree of involvement. I'm seeing other comments [1] placing those actions on the game studio, so I suppose my first impression was incorrect.
Campo Santo is the developer and Panic is the publisher.
Obviously we can't know Panic's involvement in the debacle, but the Campo Santo founder did take ownership of the decision by announcing it on his personal Twitter account. In other words, it wasn't a faceless Campo Santo or Panic blog post.
At which point I think it's kinda unfair to poison the comment section on such an unrelated development. This is currently the top-voted thread on a post announcing a code editor. Meanwhile, Vanaman is a creative writer for Valve.
How many more times will HN discussion around this editor have to be side-tracked by Vanaman's tweets until HN considers Panic atoned?
I don't give a damn about the person in that incident. I do give a damn about blatant political abuse of the law, particularly by people in our industry who have no excuse for not knowing better.
> poison the comment section on such an unrelated development.
You don't think ethics of the company's leadership are relevant, in situations involving products that they create or hold copyright or exclusive distribution rights to? Bringing it up is not just distaste for Sasser's politics, but a view into what may happen to users or reviewers of products sold by them. You may decide the risk is extremely low (it probably is) or that you don't care, but it doesn't seem entirely irrelevant to me.
I wonder if in that particular case the demand came from Panic of from the game studio (Campo Santo) they were collaborating with. It's even worse since they explicitly allowed anybody to stream and upload videos using the game and then renegged on the agreement.
Actually.. it's bullshit. If playing a game online infringes the game maker's copyrights, then playing a guitar online infringes the guitar maker's copyrights.
Generally not, at least if it is produced in any quantity. Typically, they are protected by design patents and industrial design rights.
As an example, in Canada, if you produced less than 50 of an item like a guitar, you could copyright it. Basically this is intended to cover an artist making sculpture. If you are making it for utilitarian purposes to be widely distributed, you use the other methods in the law for protecting your designs.
I'm super excited by this announcement. Yes, I'm a Panic fanboy and have been since I first used Transmit over 15 years ago. I've long since moved away from Panic software – as the development process changed I didn't feel like their solutions were as relevant anymore. But that's what excites me about their announcement – they're admitting things have changed so much that an incremental release won't cut it, they have to go back to the drawing board. And when they do that, great things happen.
There's a lot of skepticism in the comments about the size of the undertaking and their ability to produce something significantly different in a crowded market. Isn't that what we all do to some degree? And I would argue they have a proven track record of doing that repeatedly (with some flops mixed in as well). Transmit didn't invent FTP interfaces, but the ease of use and speed were head and shoulders above the existing clients. They're getting some flack for their claims about Coda, but it really was a giant step forward over existing editors at the time.
One of the reasons I've always liked Panic is that they dog food their products and it shows. They have always been at the edge of web design and development (including the controversial margin on this page) and that comes from building and using an advanced toolset. Can't wait to see what comes next.
> That’s a fair question. Many of our competitors are free, and we really rely on, well, revenue.
After a decade on Mac, I finally bought a Windows laptop. The think I miss most is the quality software. Apple users are willing to pay for software, so you have great apps like Scrivener, OmniFocus, Coda, etc. But the culture of “free” has overrun Windows, and for the most part, it’s a disaster. There is no revenue potential in many areas of software, especially B2C software, and it shows in a lack of quality.
The think I miss most is the quality software. Apple users are willing to pay for software, so you have great apps like Scrivener, OmniFocus, Coda, etc
Interesting that you say that: I just wrote to Literature & Latte (makers of Scrivener) asking about Linux, and they said they shut down development, which is a shame: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&.... I suggested a Kickstarter.
On Linux, Da Vinci Resolve replaces FCP X effectively, but Scrivener and Devonthink Pro seem to have no good replacements.
I also switched from Mac back to Windows recently, and am curious what you're missing.
Scrivener is available for Windows (though I use Hemingway.)
OmniFocus has many web-based alternatives...I use Trello, personally. (It's also a Windows app now!)
Coda -- well, there's Sublime Text, VS Code, or JetBrains' universe of IDEs.
This isn't a critique of what you said, by the way. I do think more info about what you're looking for would be great insight for the folks who read Hacker News -- some of whom might be willing to develop paid Windows apps if there's true demand in those areas.
Scrivener is a second class citizen on Windows (e.g. no version 3 yet.) The money is clearly on Mac.
There is really no good OmniFocus alternative on Windows. Most are too simple, or more focused on coordinating teams than having lots of tools for an individual juggling lots of things. E.g. Todoist (and many other web apps) doesn’t have proper sub-tasks. Almost none has a proper review mode. MyLifeOrganized is really good, but it lacks the polish of OnniFocus. (Likely because it has a much smaller team than Omni, because Windows users aren’t willing to pay.) Trello is great for what it does, but its calendar integration is an afterthought.
Stuff is a little better on the developer tool side, where there is still a willingness to pay for stuff like Jetbrains. VS Code though is a good example of how free products are worse (less features, Electron, etc.) than paid software (Visual Studio).
> Scrivener is a second class citizen on Windows (e.g. no version 3 yet.) The money is clearly on Mac.
I wonder if they've ever published a breakdown on Mac vs. Windows users or if you're just making that up? They've stated they spend more on Windows development, although they evidently aren't getting enough out of it.
> OmniFocus has many web-based alternatives...I use Trello, personally
I love Trello, but it’s an OF ‘alternative’ at best. It is no way a replacement. OmniFocus is an order of magnitude more powerful. Even an app like Things doesn’t get close; I use both, and while I’d like to maintain an OF=home/Things=work separation, there are a bunch of things that I do that Things just can’t handle.
On the subject of quality software more generally, this is one of the major frustrations I have when forced to use Windows. On my Mac, if I need a bit of software to do a job there is generally – not always, of course, but generally – something well written, well supported, and beautiful. I find it, give the developer $5-$50, and enjoy a long and fruitful relationship.
If I need software on Windows, it’s a hot mess. I mean it’s just a fucking disaster. You Google what you want and get all sorts of shite. You risk your neck and download some file from Sourceforge. You ‘install’ it and have to reboot. Reboot? To install software? Wow. Okay. So you reboot then you launch the software and guess what? It’s a fucking turd.
> I find it, give the developer $5-$50, and enjoy a long and fruitful relationship.
> You Google what you want and get all sorts of shite. You risk your neck and download some file from Sourceforge.
You are comparing buying an application from a commercial developer who - if nothing else - has at least an incentive to provide a good experience and downloading an application for free written by someone who may or may not care further about the program than dumping it in a shared hosting service and you are surprised that the former is better?
How about 'finding' equivalent commercial software for Windows?
> You ‘install’ it and have to reboot. Reboot? To install software?
Unless the program targets Windows 95/98, this is not necessary and the largest majority of programs designed for Windows 2000 and later should not need reboot (even during Windows 9x it was unnecessary most of the time and was there 'just in case').
> I hate it. Viscerally hate it.
Then do something about it: support the developers who write quality software.
Windows has a lot more software than Mac and unlike Mac, software in Windows keeps working for years on (i personally use a lot of older software, largely because it is faster on modern machines). This means you have a TON of options, but at the same time Sturgeon's law enters in the picture so with the more options you have more crap. The other side of the coin is that you also have more quality options too.
Yes it is harder to find good software, but it is far from impossible. One way is to look for sites dedicated to software and then look for comments about those sites in Reddit, etc and ignore those that have bad comments. Another way is to ask in communities like Reddit's /r/software - people will try to steer you towards cheap/halfass solutions and ask you why would you want to pay $1 to do X instead of spending a few weeks jury rigging the free Y+Z+W+4+5 (which btw are open source, thus have god given quality status) to do mostly the same thing except a little more broken, but if you insist about what you want, you'll often find good software there (i have found some nice apps through the subreddit myself).
TBH it has been years since i used a Mac extensively, but i do not remember finding quality Mac software being any different than quality Windows software - i mostly relied on sites and communities too.
Apple does not pay much attention to backwards compatibility, deprecates APIs all the time, changes how they work, etc and if something is undocumented it is free for all to axe it regardless of how many applications use it. Microsoft, on the other hand, pays a lot of attention to backwards compatibility and tries to keep things running regardless of them being documented or not (which IMO is the right approach to take, if something is accessible then it is part of your public interface regardless of it being intentional or not - of course this can lead to more messy implementation, but this is secondary to keep applications running).
As a result, none of the programs in my 2009 iMac work anymore - a few games, a few commercial applications (e.g. Pixelmator), etc, every time i upgraded macOS i lost one or two applications that were not compatible, until the point when macOS itself became not compatible with my iMac (and i am certain that if i try to move any remaining applications to another Mac, more stuff will not work). No matter what workarounds i tried to do, they didn't work.
On the other hand, i have Windows software from a decade before my iMac even existed that still works perfectly fine under Windows 10 exactly because Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility. For example i have a boxed version of Paint Shop Pro 7 (the last great version of PSP with the best UI for an image editor, IMO) which comes with the application itself as well as a couple of addons (an animation editor and an image organizer) and all of them work literally out of the box (some older applications might need a few tweaks here and there but they usually work easily, but others like PSP7 work with no tweaks at all).
For me this is a big reason why i stopped buying software on macOS: with their behavior towards API compatibility, Apple forces an expiration date to the software. On the other hand i do not even care if the company behind some piece of Windows software will exist or not in 5 years, since chances are i'll be able to run it regardless (assuming there is no need for Internet-based activation or some bullshit like that, which is why i avoid that type of software too).
I guess Linux is kinda similar here, partly because Linus insists on backwards compatibility but also because even if the APIs change you can still compile the older libraries, although that is talking from a purely personal perspective (this would be very high on the "tweak difficulty" for most people) and in practice nobody sells stuff i'd be interested on Linux anyway so i haven't experienced it beyond trying some older game demos from very early 2000s (which mostly worked after i installed an OSS emulator and an older C++ library, with the exception of -IIRC- a Shogo port that needed Gtk1 for the launcher - which i could compile or copy from Slackware that still provides packages for it, but i lost interest).
Still i'd trust Windows more to stay compatible and even under Linux i'd trust Wine before any other API.
And note that in all that i ignore Apple changing CPU architecture every few years (which, according to rumors, are going to do again soon).
While it's true that Apple has shifted wholesale more than Windows (from OS 9 to OS X; from PPC to Intel), I haven't found myself running aground on deprecated software often enough to notice.
It's probably true that if you really need binaries built during the Clinton administration to work, the Mac isn't for you. That such binaries still run on Windows is, to me, evidence of a problem in that world, not a feature.
I'd make an argument that Apple's willingness to do "big jumps" and cut ties with the past (in controlled ways, with long lead times and compatibility layers supported for a while after) is a strength of the platform, and leads to a more coherent and more stable environment.
Especially since most users have no need for ancient programs.
>f something is undocumented it is free for all to axe it regardless of how many applications use it.
This in particular seems like a feature. If it's not a documented part of the programming environment, use it at your peril.
>i ignore Apple changing CPU architecture every few years
Here's where I actually laughed at you. Characterizing "twice since 1984" as "every few years" is absurdly unreasonable.
I get it. You like that Windows is still basically the same house-of-cards system it was in 1995. Lots of people, though, don't think of this as a good thing. The Mac has thrived, I'd argue, BECAUSE of Apple's willingness to shift for the greater platform benefit -- off 68x to PPC for power; off PPC to Intel for both power and strategic reasons; into the BSD-based OSX for stability, power, and growth. Microsoft could learn a lot here.
> It's probably true that if you really need binaries built during the Clinton administration to work, the Mac isn't for you.
Notice that i'm talking about macOS being unable to run applications released less than 10 years ago. Of course older stuff would be even better, but macOS cannot do a third of that.
> That such binaries still run on Windows is, to me, evidence of a problem in that world, not a feature.
To me, as someone who actually wants to use the software and not wax about theoretical benefits (that in practice do not apply since macOS is these days - or at least was until a year or so ago, i didn't bother with it much since then - woefully unstable), this isn't just a feature, it is THE feature. The main reason i use Windows.
> I'd make an argument that Apple's willingness to do "big jumps" and cut ties with the past (in controlled ways, with long lead times and compatibility layers supported for a while after) is a strength of the platform, and leads to a more coherent and more stable environment.
That'd be nice if the environment was actually stable, but the last version that was approaching decent stability was Snow Leopard, everything after that is a downhill (especially since Apple decided to switch to periodic releases, as if an OS is a comic magazine).
> Especially since most users have no need for ancient programs.
There is no such a thing as "most users", different people have different needs and people do not care about something until the moment that something turns around and bites them.
> If it's not a documented part of the programming environment, use it at your peril.
You seem to not understand, this "you" who are talking about is not me, it is the developer of the program i am using.
I am not talking as the developer of the program, the developer can change it and it'll keep working.
I am talking as the USER of the program, a program whose developer might not even exist anymore or may have decided to screw me over and not fix their bugs. But this sort of developer wont care about Apple breaking their program, it is the users who will have to suffer the program not working.
Backwards compatibility is 90% for the users and only 10% for the developer (which is most likely why most developers do not care much about it, unless they become personally affected of course - and probably why most inexperienced developers do not see any issue with breaking backwards compatibility at all).
> Lots of people, though, don't think of this as a good thing. The Mac has thrived, I'd argue,
Your argument would be wrong considering the ridiculously gargantuan majority of desktop and laptop computers are using Windows only because they can run the programs the users care about.
Software is what makes an OS relevant, nothing else. The only purpose for an OS is to run the users' programs.
> Microsoft could learn a lot here.
If the lesson learned ends up in breaking people's programs, i'd rather them learning nothing.
>To me, as someone who actually wants to use the software
Oh, is that what I'm doing? Gosh, all this time I thought I was doing meaningful work using the software.
>woefully unstable
Is that really your experience? I mean, I run OSX on all the machines in my house, and work in it all day every day, and I haven't found it to be unstable at ALL. It might not be as rock-solid as it was 5 years ago, but it still manages to stay up and reasonable for months at a time, so it's a distinction without a difference.
My Windows machines can barely manage a few days without something coming along that requires a reboot to resolve.
>There is no such a thing as "most users"
That's not how math works.
When I said "If it's not a documented part of the programming environment, use it at your peril," I absolutely mean the developer. Don't use undocumented behavior. It's a dumb idea, and it absolutely WILL bite you. I mean, this isn't hard; if $vendor says "that's not documented or supported, and we can and will change that behavior," then it's malpractice to build a product that depends on it.
That MSFT has been less strict about this is a problem, not a feature.
>Your argument would be wrong
It, like all arguments, might well be -- but you certainly haven't demonstrated that it is.
Windows still enjoyed desktop hegemony because of momentum, and because you can buy a shitty Windows laptop for $200. It's not because Paint Shop Pro from 1999 still runs on it.
>i'd rather them learning nothing.
Well, you're absolutely getting your wish, because that appears to be what they've learned.
I don't know who is that, i'm not really following any Mac people, i speak from my personal experience as someone who used to be very into macOS for a while but lost interest due to the increasing instability and broken software every new version.
Like a decent editor, I tried coda and found it extremely limited no plugins, limited language support and no configuration. This has been my experience with all mac software.
Friends have recommended different software but when I tried to install it through iTunes I found the developers had went bankrupt or it was not available in my country, searching for apps on google seems to be a dead end.
I tried to find software so that I could use a normal mouse at a decent speed but again found them broken, relying on system calls that are undocumented. I found one which worked until I updated to Mojave but then they removed the system calls it used an it no longer works, so theres $100 down the drain.
Im not a fan of window but its so easy to just search google download it for free and it works your done.
Linux you just search your package manger download it for free configure it to do exactly what you want and it works your done.
> found them broken, relying on system calls that are undocumented
> they removed the system calls it used an it no longer works, so theres $100 down the drain
And that is why backwards compatibility is important and why only Microsoft seem to get it (and Linus but sadly that doesn't extend to the userspace, except X11 but dumbheads want to remove that too) - it doesn't matter if the company is bankrupt after you get your program, it will keep in working doing what it always did. It doesn't matter if the OS gets updated with new features and driver support because the APIs will keep working for the older programs that use them (and sometimes even get new features since new programs may also use these APIs - although Microsoft doesn't have a great record here with introducing new GUI APIs every few years, but at least older stuff do not get abandoned). Your $100 (or whatever) wont be down the drain, it'll be spent on something that works for many years to come. In the meanwhile macOS will break half of its APIs and go through three different CPU architectures, ensuring nothing will work.
My 2c having switched from Mac to Windows and also lamenting some of the software:
* The closest I've found to Coda on Windows is HTMLPad 2018 - though it took a while for me to discover "mappings" so I could get the in-app browser preview working. It doesn't have the polish Coda does - eg lots of icons are too tiny in HiDPI mode.
* Cyberduck is the closest I've found to Panic Transmit, but it's also blurry in HiDPI modes, and has a nasty bug where large files over 100MB uploaded to Backblaze B2 won't complete & terminate as corrupted.
* Windows start menu sort've replaces Alfred App, but it's not as easy to do things like type quick math equations (it sends them out to Bing instead of calculating locally, so it's much slower)
* I really, really miss Cathode by Secret Geometry. It costs $5 but I'd easily pay $20. If I have to use the terminal I'd like to do it in style. Cathode is a terminal app that emulates CRT displays, including flicker, jitter, static & curvature. Cool Retro Term is closest, but there's no Windows version, and certainly not without lots of hacks to try and make the Linux version work through Windows Subsystem For Linux.
(I'm sure there's others I've missed, but that's the first that leaps to mind.)
Windows app GUI is a joke. After people widely used Windows for over 20 years, their cluttered interface never got any better having 10 menus, 20 buttons shown at once where many of Mac apps got that right with simpler and effective interface.
If I have the option to choose between WinSCP and Transmit, Transmit is the obvious choice. CyberDuck interface isn't as bad as those Windows only ones but not as polished.
I too feel similarly. I was disappointed to have to leave Coda behind when I started using Linux more often than Mac OS. On Linux you are rewarded for using the tools that other Linux users celebrate. Life just becomes easier that way. So some of the bells and whistles of Coda and other commercial packages like some of the mind mapping apps are missed, but somehow life goes on. I am much happier now in my desktop environment overall, though.
Linux seems to have decent dev environment with VS Code now, maybe except for a good lightweight GUI database manager.
Mac just has the best overall quality apps because people are used to paying $10, $20 for something decent. I'll never use Windows for development for the lack of third party tool quality.
If you don't think there's quality software for Windows, you have zero clue, and you didn't even try to look. There's tons and tons of high quality software for Windows, lots of it used in the industry. The whole world runs on MS Word and MS Excel.
It depends what people mean by "quality". I'd suggest they don't usually mean "enterprise" software or software that is used in industry. They mean software that is nice to look at, pleasant to use, and flexible enough to fulfil their requirements.
What an incredibly narrow viewpoint. It is true that for certain creative industries there are better tools available for OSX. But Windows has a leg up on OSX for many industry specific tasks as well, like intense realtime video graphics processing amongst many other tasks.
More to the point, Sublime Text, Visual Studio Code, Atom and other competitors for panic's editors are fine apps themselves. Visual Studio Code is free and open and it is as good as any editor that Panic can create or has created in the past. There is a ton of free and open and good software out there. Like Linux, Kubernetes, or dotnet, or golang to name a few.
Maybe if you qualified your statement to consumer apps, you may have more of a point.
You didn't contradict their viewpoint and I think your response is symbolic of what they're talking about when it comes to windows and linux. The apps are technically capable but mediocre at best in design and polish. Panic's software blows all software on these platforms away.
What is frustrating is the chicken and egg problem on Windows too.... I'll pay, but hard to find software / not many good recommendations for software.
I'm speaking more generally rather than any given product.
As someone who wrote Indie Windows software, it's not only the problem of supply vs. demand (I'd actually argue that there are a fair amount of people who are happy to pay Coda-levels of money for software), the biggest problem is marketing.
If you're an Indie macOS or iOS dev, you've got so many places to drum up news about your app. If you're on Windows? There's Windows Central, and a few smaller blogs (and Reddit, but rules against self-promotion in most subs mean you're very likely to get your post whacked). Promotion is a huge challenge for Windows desktop devs
Interesting that they chose to compete on Mac, instead of iPad, as they could have easily commanded the majority of the iOS market share. Coda had some of the best support for editing directly on remote servers, and this would fit the iPad usage model quite well.
Competing solely on Mac seems strange. I’ve used vscode on multiple operating systems for a bunch of languages/deployments/use cases, and the speed and availability of plugins is great.
There is room for niche stuff, but this blog post is too vague to determine what niche they are now trying to fill.
As a previous coda user and someone whose spent a considerable amount of time with many IDEs/text editors, it looks like they forked vscode and are trying to see if people want them to develop a new app.
If they are actually using something internally that was good, then, as a development software selling company, they would be promoting the product’s actual benefits instead of writing this fluff about considering/reluctantly releasing their ‘awesome internal tool’. How many companies make their own internal editors anyway?
iOS Coda is honestly, embarrassingly bad. It takes like 6 or 7 taps to start actually editing a document and it still doesn’t sync files between devices. An app that is proud of how “native” it is doesn’t support iCloud (or Dropbox, or any other syncing) in the year 2019.
I've used it for emergencies a few times, and you're right that it's a bit cumbersome to get going. But I've never had a problem with syncing between iPhone, iPad, iMac, and MacBook Air.
I'd also like it to use iCloud for sync. Panic explained a little bit about why it uses its own platform in a blog post I found recently, but it was kind of vague.
As another commenter noted, the claim is more that Coda was the first "one app for all": a built-in text editor, FTP client, real-time previewer, site manager, and terminal.
Even so, as much as I like Panic, I don't know if I'd quite support that claim. Dreamweaver did a lot of those things sans the terminal, even if it did a lot of them less elegantly. (And I'm sure someone will explain how Emacs could technically have done all this since 1953 or whatever. I kid, I kid!)
Having said that, I'm still interested in seeing what they manage to come up with. I admire their products even when I don't regularly use them. (This includes Coda.)
I confess my memories of Homesite are pretty dim at this point, even though I used it professionally for a few years. I recall it as being notably worse at the non-editing parts of that than Coda is, but still, credit where it's due.
(Semi-funny anecdote: when I switched to the Mac around 1999 or so, I emailed Allaire--this was before Macromedia bought them--and asked if there would ever be a Mac version. They wrote back nicely enough to explain that they really couldn't do one because it was written in Delphi, which had no Mac version, but that I should consider looking into BBEdit. I still use BBEdit regularly to this day.)
I still use HomeSite+ in a Windows XP virtual machine as a CFML editor. I know it's an embarrassingly outdated piece of software, but I'm familiar with it and every attempt to migrate to something newer failed. I do use BBEdit for CSS and XCode for ObjC, it's just that HS+ styles and autocompletes CFML in a familiar way.)
If you think it's crazy to run a whole VM to edit text files, consider that as it uses half a gig of memory, can load from cold to an editable window in a few seconds, and the UI is hilariously snappy, running an XP VM is competitive with running Eclipse. And that is saying something.
Much like George R.R. Martin who still uses WordStar for DOS, it's just the consequence of what we're comfortable with—and who cares what tools you use as long as the output isn't compromised.
CF Studio (Homesite's big brother) was my first thought. I used it for 10+ years before switching to OSX and even that Mac switch was many years ago. I'd guess CF Studio has been around for ~20 years and had FTP, site management, datasource interaction, etc.
PageMill is a contender too, from 1995. Dreamweaver in 1997. I remember using both of those in one of my first jobs.
PageMill doesn't have a real site manager, it only has a sidebar that shows the files of a folder, but doesn't know anything about the site's structure. It is really just a notch above Netscape Composer.
I looked at Coda and thought it was targeting a very specific one person shop type developer. Like the type of person who wanted SASS and minifiers and all that good stuff, but didn't want to deal with NPM and gulp/grunt/webpack/etc, and just a button to push to go live.
The issue is the competition is a bunch of free Github project templates, and that git workflows are standardized now. (Plus I've been using Macs since the cro magnon era and VS Code works great for me despite not being "native"). So I'm interested what they come up with but I'm suspecting it will target a very specific workflow & type of customer.
Quite likely. Coda is great at what it does, but it doesn't integrate with version control systems, which is a fatal flaw at this point. I suspect that's going to be addressed in the next version, but I'm curious how "general" they're planning to make it. Another commenter theorized Panic might be setting it up to be more of a Webstorm competitor than a VS Code competitor.
It's classic Apple-cultism, everything is done there first, even if it wasn't. Lets just say it's not surprising they're making their new editor Mac only.
Dreamweaver and Frontpage were around in the last 90s.
I'm pretty sure my first HTML editor (Arachnophobia) which I used in 1995 or 96 sort of era supported those things too.
I used to love that editor. It was basically Notepad++ but HTML specific and written long before Notepad++ was a thing. And super fast too what with it being a Windows native application (back then - I think it was since rewritten in Java for whatever reason).
Did Dreamweaver support all stages of web development, including uploading to your server? I think that's what Panic is talking about here, how Coda was your one-stop shop for everything, including deploying your site.
Yes it did, and more! It even came with exploitable binaries, thus earning the distinction of being the first HTML editor to compromise your website for you.
This is about Frontpage, the parent post is about Dreamweaver.
Also it is misleading, the linked page is about the server-side Frontpage Extensions, if you used Frontpage as an HTML page editor you'd just get a static site which is as secure as any other site made of static HTML files.
What are you talking about? The page was very explicit about what it meant:
> It put the tools you needed to make a web page together in one app, and nobody had ever done that before.
All I did was ask if Dreamweaver supported one particular aspect of this, given that I'm not familiar with Dreamweaver's features beyond "WYSIWYG editing".
It was actually a really sophisticated tool when it was released but it was more aimed at non-programmers in that it's primary usage was code generation. So those of use who prefer to write the code ourselves would have given it a wide berth.
I consulted for clients in early 2000 that would use "publish" in Dreamweaver to FTP (and maybe even SFTP[1]) upload their site, from what I recall.
1: I don't remember whether it was FTP over TLS or SSH FTP. You might assume the former, but this was a very weird age for file uploads, and I remember being surprised more than once...
I used CF Studio in the late 1990s and it had FTP/RDS/SourceSafe, some semblance of WYSIWYG, datasources/databases, etc. Can't see how Coda would even come close to being the OG without a very narrow definition of features. Dreamweaver had FTP/etc at various points.
Having used Dreamweaver and the original Coda for work, they really weren’t comparable apps. Dreamweaver was all about layout and did complex layout things Coda never did, while Coda made most of the basics of web development (of that era) really easy.
For example, connecting to a remote server was a weird proprietary complex thing in Dreamweaver, whereas in Coda it was straight up basic FTP. And Coda even shipped with HTML and CSS reference manuals built in.
I used Frontpage a bit too. I have to say the handwringing here over which was “the first” is silly and a waste of time. Coda was, at least for this Mac user, a major step forward from Dreamweaver, Frontpage, etc. Panic is not a threat to Adobe... let them claim what they want IMO. No one needs to defend Dreamweaver.
Coda landed in a pretty short window in my web development world, between the end of using Dreamweaver templates, but before using git and local development workflows. I never tried Coda 2; I went to the command line for git and stayed there for nano, vim, SSH, etc.
I'm very partial to JetBrains IDEs. To me it's either a great IDE like the JetBrains products or a great text editor like emacs or vim. I never really understood the folks moving from TextMate to Sublime, to Atom and as of late VSCode.
Is it really the low barrier of entry that comes with free and low learning curve? We spend so much time as professional developers with these tools that dropping a few bucks on a IDE or spending some time developing good vim or emacs skills seems like a obvious investment. These lighter editors seem like a low investment, low return choice.
I don't think low learning curve has much to do with it (for most of us). I also don't think these light editors are 'low investment, low return' choices.
It's all part of a continuum. With Emacs often more on the side of IDEs, and Sublime more on the side of text editors.
For me and many others, text editors have been preferable over IDEs for all sorts of reasons, but we do like a lot of the features that IDEs offer. To some extent that's been solvable through plugins, but for many VSCode in particular hits the sweet spot of being a text editor that has a bunch of IDE-like features as first-class citizens on top of the many extensions available.
The success of VSCode really highlights why these 'light editors' are so popular, I think. Unlike IDEs, it doesn't offer you every possible feature under the sun in a confusing, often slow package and interface. But unlike Vim/Sublime/Emacs, it does offer sensible defaults, and well-integrated 'core' plugins that most developers will want anyways. And through various plugins we get vim keybindings and many of the other features of IDEs too.
It's a bit like the framework/library discussion. The best approach is usually "it depends", but in my experience, for my editor needs, a minimal framework is the sweet spot. I don't want Rails, but I also don't want Express.js.
(I really want Phoenix, actually, but that's not relevant)
I use PHPStorm more than WebStorm but I know they share a lot of similarities. I love it. Everything from the Git integration to code quality tools, code completion, built in terminal, etc. It's a phenomenal IDE. This new app would have to be really compelling, particularly its build tools support (npm, webpack, sass/minifiers, etc).
yeah, I tend to opt for a jetbrains editor, if that's not available then I'll use something like vscode. I also like that both are cross platform as I use both Mac and Windows
I applaud a new commercial application bringing competition to the editor field. But does anyone else think that building exclusively for Mac is a risky strategy? I’m a diehard Apple user and hope I never have to compute in an era when Apple still isn’t producing Macs. But even I see the writing on the wall that Windows is becoming more and more developer-friendly, with VS Code and cross-platform Sublime vastly reducing the friction in moving from MacOS to Windows. Even if the new Coda was heads above the pack, I would be very reluctant to put money and learning/muscle-memory time into a new app that could easily go the way of Textmate after a couple of years.
Keep in mind that Panic has been a Mac-only shop since the early days of the platform, before OS X, back when Apple was viewed as a beleaguered company and Microsoft's dominance of computing was unquestioned.
If they stuck with Apple through all that, I can't see why they'd be worried now.
I can’t see myself doing dev work under Windows at all. Playing games or something else where the OS UI never factors into the experience at all? Sure, but for anything else there are better options.
Some Linux distro seems more likely but I have yet to encounter a DE that gets everything right (for me) right out of the box or anything close to that. A ridiculous amount of config tweaking is required to get things into a state that suits my preferences, and even then there’s tons of stupid little annoyances that I’ll never be able to fix short of forking a bunch of stuff.
Walk into any coffee shop in America and you'll see every hacker inside using a Mac. One or two odd ducks will have some kind of nix ultrabook setup. Even here in SoCal you can go into a Philz and see 5 people coding on a Mac w/ VS Code and Slack open at some time or another.
So I don't think targeting macOS is by any means a bad idea. Based on the echo chamber that is HN you'd think everyone was jumping ship to Surface tablets and WSL but it's really not as common as you think.
I personally have noticed that in the UK the Mac is more of a "fashion computer" to be seen with in the oh-so-trendy coffee shop. Like a handbag.
I'd also question who those people sitting in the coffee shop on a weekday are? Are they a representative sample of professional coders, or are the professional coders actually at work - you know, at the office - rather than hanging out at the coffee shop?
I use a Linux and Mac professionally for coding, and a Windows machine personally for coding. Particularly with Linux running natively on windows now, there isn't really any difference these days apart from the OS's UX IME. Mac laptops are physically nice machines I agree (there is that fashion again!) but I personally find OSX to be a nightmare to use for real work as it seems designed to make multitasking difficult (hiding multiple windows under one icon in the dock, every app sharing the menu bar, beach-balling, touchbar and F- keys, no escape key, no native window layout/arranging/snapping etc etc). It's great if you are just doing one thing at a time, but start to need to have multiple windows/apps at once and I find it frustrating as hell to deal with, while Win10 and photon or cinnamon on Linux are just fine.
I concur. Though anecdotal I catch a buddy of mine frequently when I drop by Dunkin in a rush and he usually is on a windows laptop watching some esport or getting in some MMO time before work.
As someone who’s worked on both coasts I can definitely attest to seeing Macs dominate. When I taught at a university I always fretted about making a Windows version of my keyboard-shortcuts/install process guides until the first day and invariably just 1 out of 20 students would be on a non-Mac.
But that’s not the way it is everywhere (was just at a Chicago hack night). And Windows is not only still the dominant base, but Microsoft’s direction is more trending toward in favor of everyday developers than Apple’s.
It’s not just a matter of market viability, but having enough of a user base to create and perpetuate a good ecosystem (e.g. plugin development) around the app.
I actually loved Coda back in the day. One of my coworkers still uses it a lot, but his entire workfow depends on editing code on smallish production sites via (S)FTP. I find that approach fatally flawed for modern front-end and/or not-so-small projects. I really wouldn't go back from my Webpack + Production CI/CD to editing live websites. Many of the performance improvements needed to achieve very fast websites these days depend on tasks that belong more to the CI/CD than to your local development environment. For instance the generation of critical CSS and webpack's production build, which is slower if it includes the JS and CSS optimizations. Finally, a deterministic (or as much as possible) process to upload the changes to production. I find Sublime Text better as an editor for that kind of front-end workflow and there's quite some good extensions I've favored throughout the years that don't exist in Coda. I'm curious and optimistic about this new Panic editor, let's see how it goes!
I enjoyed Panic's polished applications since way back when but the way they simply drop paid for apps with an existing userbase due to "lack of revenue" (Status Board [1], Transmit on iOS [2], Unison [3] and Audion [4]) really left a sour taste in my mouth.
Transmit for iOS was a particularly big loss for me, so much so that I personally am going out of my way to avoid their products.
They also pulled original Prompt from the AppStore because, apparently, it completely impossible to rebuild it for the x64 target.
"Luckily" it was replaced by Prompt 2 that was basically the same thing slightly improved (but "rebuild from the ground up" for reasons unknown) that you had to buy afresh.
I've never heard of them before (coda.io). Seems like they raised a lot of money [0] and are generally competing in the space of airtable [1]. More surprising, coda.io is still free and has no pricing [2]. I get that they are in land grab, but I would be afraid to put my work on a platform that can come out anytime and charge essentially any sum of money.
If my memory is correct, wasn't Microsoft Frontpage old when something like Coda appeared? Given I do not know what Coda is as compared to another all in one app for web development..
I've never heard of Panic. I've never heard of Coda. I don't develop on a Mac and I'll likely never be in their target audience.
But reading this product announcement gave me a real feeling for the genuine care and quality that these people put into their work that I'm curious enough to figure out a way to try their product. As banal as another editor might seem to some, the care of craftsmanship that this post exudes is refreshing.
Coda was my primary editor up until around 2011 when I switched to Sublime Text. The built in FTP/SFTP transfers was a really big time saver and key feature. Things have changed quite a bit since then in the editor landscape, curious to see what comes.
I primary do DevOps today, and I think if their new editor implemented some DevOpsy features could be huge selling point. Remote SSH and running commands, terminal integration, git integration.
VSCode is a good editor, but it's very much in the JS-camp of stuff sort of works once you've fought through configuration and dug through SO.
Also it's manifestly un-Mac-like in noticeable ways. For example it's hard to know if I've saved a file, because Command-S doesn't highlight the menubar, no matter how many times I press it. Basic Mac features, MIA.
I'm ready for something that just works, so you'll find me camping outside Panic's digital store.
VS Code has some good features and rapid iteration but it is slow. Slow to start, slow to render pages when you switch tabs.
Sublime Text may not have BBedits ability with massive files but for 99% of the time it is lightning quick and rock solid.
As such, I think a natively coded Mac editor could nail the requisite speed but also enjoy some novel features beyond the spartan default environment of Sublime.
Until an editor starts integrating some of the features of aneditor that Gary Bernhardt talks about here[0] I won't believe any talk of a "new" or "next step" editor.
Nice, but I think I can raise you. That talk mostly seemed pretty predictable (though I incorrectly guessed gfx via sixels[0], not a(nother) terminal emulator). If your interest was piqued with that parent video though, prepare to have your mind blown with this[1], who’s thesis maybe similar in the sense of “stop _just_ simply working”. Bernhardt seems to be saying don’t be afraid to take time and think deeply and “go deep”, while Victor is explicitly saying make it count by way of targeting with intention what’s important to you. A sort of “fight the good fight.”
Happy to hear from Panic about this. I used to use Coda all the time and loved it. I can’t be sure that I will switch to using whatever this new thing is, but I’m confident that it will be lovely, as nearly everything Panic makes.
Somehow the letter feels very defensive, like someone accused them of being hopelessly behind and having no chance to ever be relevant again.
Doubling down on a mac only editor seems super weird. At a time when Apples actions seem like they are de-prioritizing the line, Panic are going all in?
It would seem a better investment to make the go to IDE-y thing on iPad Pro.
Wow, glad I got Transmit when I did, even if I didn't realize for over an entire year that they stopped selling it. I had a reason to use it just this weekend when I needed to be able to download something on iOS from Safari for import to another program. Since Transmit could receive anything, I sent the file there, then because Transmit is a file provider, could use it to import to the other, less flexible program. Since it wasn't free, I tested it on my iPad before suggesting the workflow to someone else, but was frustrated that I couldn't find it in the App Store. I guess this explains it, and I guess I'm part of the problem, using it so infrequently.
If this new editor isn't free out of the gate, I am doubtful I'll even try it. I love the stuff of theirs that I own, but I'm not sure I'm willing to gamble on their apps any longer. At least the Mac versions tend to have free trials.
In the age of iCloud, Dropbox, and 200 other services and alternative ways to move stuff, why would one want to use a FTP client (like the Transmit above) on the iPad?
The market for FTP clients is small enough on the desktop...
(Heck, I'm a developer, I have a Transmit license since 2006 or so, I work with dozens of remote machines, and seldom ever use it. It's either sftp on the command line, or something like an Ansible wrapper etc).
Transmit on iOS is not only a FTP client and I never used it for that. The integration into the iOS share sheet with SSH file transfer support is perfect for me and I use this all the time. Are there any reliable alternatives that are still actively developed?
Yeah, I know, I have a license for it on OS X. It also does SCP/SFTP/S3 and others. But in the end it's still a pretty limited offering, for special cases (geeks wanting to use the iPad for administration or development, for example).
Not the kind of mass market app the general iPad users would buy en masse.
Also lftp has been working since the middle ages and will continue to do so. Cross platform.
The point is that convenient file transfer is a long solved problem with nice foss tools that are never going to stop working because of consumer market shifts.
I feared the same thing but Panic assured me via Twitter that Coda for iOS isn’t dead. Of course this might not mean that they are not abandoning the old app rather than bringing the new one to iOS. I remain hopeful.
Which is made to sell iPads. Not to deprioritize MacBooks...
They also have ads about how you can load a eSIM on your Apple Watch and make calls without an iPhone. But they aren't deprioritizing the iPhone any day soon...
>Also, FU everytime something is just built for macOS. It's such poor stewardship (at the very least for everyone who isn't Apple) to reinforce the walled garden that is macOS.
Really? If the non-walled garden of Linux is so wonderful, what's your problem? Other people shouldn't write the software they like for the platforms they enjoy?
I like to be able to depend on a software with commercial ties, that doesn't change when some community gets bored and has different whims (e.g. "let's redefine everything people know about Gnome 2", or "let's write the n-th audio framework").
And that also attracts major commercial packages like the Creative Suite, DAWs, VSTs, etc -- stuff which I depend on, and with no real match on FOSS world.
Well, I understand why one wants to use a native GUI toolkit (Cocoa) instead of a more generic but cross platform one (for instance Qt). GUIs just feel smoother. This has always been a thing for Mac OS applications -- but interestingly never so much for Windows applications, because look and feel was always prioritized in the designer-addicted Mac world. I like that -- the Mac UIs always used to feel high quality and polished. Nevertheless I'm a 15yrs Linux user and pay the price of the Gtk/Qt "uglinesss" for my freedom (it's not so ugly any more :D ).
Do you believe developers think: "I could make a lot of money developing software for Linux but I'm not going to bother because I love walled gardens."?
Or do they perhaps think: "I can build a viable business on MacOS so that's where I'll invest my time and energy.".
Applications should use the native GUI APIs for the OS they are running on, native GUI APIs are not there for shits and giggles, they provide actual functionality and not using them is a waste of resources. Linux having the desktop equivalent of ADHD is an example to avoid, not to mimic.
I feel the opposite. Cross-platform toolkits such as Qt are "good enough" but not great. I wish more apps would be written using the native toolkit of the platform.
I'll tip my hat to Panic for the humility and respect towards existing Coda users by going with a new name. I'm not sure how many those amount to today, but it's a kind gesture.
I'm sure their products are great, but what kind of hubris and/or complete lack of historical perspective do you have to have to write this with a straight face:
"Twelve years ago we introduced Coda, the world’s first web development editor. It put the tools you needed to make a web page together in one app, and nobody had ever done that before."
I'm not a developer but I use an advanced text editor (Notepad++ on Windows, Geany on everything else) for the little bit of webdev I have to do at work and on side jobs. I've tried every Electron based editor out there, for all the major platforms, and they are always so damn slow and unresponsive compared to a native app.
Same here. And yet, nobody I've worked with over the past 2 years feels Electron based editors are slow or unresponsive. I'm not just talking about kids who have never used anything else, either. Some of these people have been programming since the 80s.
It's like some people are sensitive to latency and some aren't.
I've also been told it's impossible to tell the difference between 60hz and 144hz. I can tell. I know this for a fact because my hackintosh will occasionally "forget" and switch my monitor back to 60hz when I wake it up from sleep. I notice immediately.
I'll admit I feel the difference more on my work machine (i5-2400, Windows 7) than my home workstations (i5-6500, Antergos Linux and Slackware Linux). It's definitely there though. Slack is another offender; we use it at work and our few remaining Core 2 machines and AMD A10 machines are brought to their knees with the Slack Electron app. Those users tend to launch it in a Chrome or Firefox window and leave that running.
I can also pick up on different refresh rates, and I was extremely sensitive to it on CRTs back in the 90s and early 2000s. I had to run at least 75Hz on a CRT or I'd have too much "shimmy" in the image and would get a headache in a few minutes of work. 60Hz on an LCD doesn't typically bother me unless its grey-to-grey response time is poor, and produces ghosting. Even with that I don't seem to get headaches from LCDs.
I felt like this about microstuttering 10 years ago. My computer was running at 100fps and yet it looked jerky and nobody else seemed to notice, and it was driving me mad.
Thank goodness VR came along with its extreme latency-sensitivity and suddenly everyone else cared about maximum frame time too.
I really wanted to like Atom. I've always felt that with the right attention, web apps can accomplish most things that native apps can.
Atom seemed promising and fast enough (I couldn't perceive any slowness), but once I started adding plugins to match the features I liked out of Sublime, I found Atom got really sluggish. I haven't tried any other electron-based editors, but I doubt it has the plugin ecosystem to compete with Sublime to VS, or any other big players.
I didn't realize how important having a responsive text-editor is, though. We expect a lot to happen with each keystroke, and we expect it all to happen before we press the next key. This is why I don't think that text editors are best done in JS.
That said, if this new text editor doesn't have features that compare with Sublime, then it isn't much better than Atom is to me.
I learned vi mostly over a 1200 baud modem connection through a crappy ISP. Would get several keystrokes ahead and then have to wait... Got sort of good at editing blind.
I believe that Panic will create a beautiful product and they have many supporters who will happily pay a license fee - I know I will!
But it’s not going to be an easy ride. There’s a lot to live up to here and they will need to have some killer features thrown in at the beginning.
The hardest part tho will be to make it an approachable tool that can hook the hobbyist but keep them on when they need more. I dropped Coda for a number of reasons, but it wasn’t because it wasn’t a great code editor.