nova vs code

Again, Nova seems to support this stuff, but the documentation is abysmal. It tells me that the thing is possible but neither gives an example nor explains exactly how it might work. I get the idea that I probably need to find documentation on creating an extension, but I can't find that. (Edit: I found the documentation!) I tried looking inside the Nova package to see if there are any syntax declaration files in it but no dice. I have literally no clue what the file should look like, nor what to do with it were I to create it.

Now, I haven't spent weeks spelunking the documentation (as I have for Visual Studio Code) nor devoted serious time to understanding its extension architecture (as I have for Visual Studio Code). This isn't fair. And I do see evidence that once I do penetrate the veil of documentation, Nova is actually going to turn out to have superb tooling for all this because of references I see to leveraging modern tools for defining parsers and syntaxes which look like things I briefly worked on after getting frustrated by tools like jison.

Not A Conclusion

All of my issues with Nova currently come down to documentation and examples. If I can figure out how to write a simple extension that will help me with writing documentation and a minimal amount of boilerplate, there's really no downside to Nova and the reduction in Window clutter is simply amazing.

So, I'm continuing my experiment and will either discover that the extension situation is awful or too proprietary (I need to be able to support Visual Studio Code users even if I don't use Visual Studio Code myself) or it will allow me to reuse most of the stuff I've done for Visual Studio Code and I'll pay Panic their extremely reasonable subscription fee.

If I hadn't spent six months working in the VS Code extension API when I was at Google and didn't care about supporting VS Code users and being able to reuse or lightly adapt snippet and syntax definitions from VS Code, my guess is I'd be sold on Nova at this point.