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Does anyone have React Native + TypeScript development/debugging experience with Nova? I'm currently using Vscode, and I'm wondering if I should have a look at Nova for this. (Nothing wrong with Vscode, I'm a bit into adventure)



I will be giving it a go for the next few days to see if it'll work for React Native development.


I'd love to know how it goes and any significant upsides/downsides.


Ok, so some feedback: I'm sad to report I stopped testing already. For my particular job I tend to debug and work with large files, especially JSON. A lot of debugging apps and looking through large crash logs, then looking at application states. This is probably not typical, but it's crucial to me.

The transition is made hard because of the odd default key mappings (they hotkey editor is very difficult to use. I went back and forward and couldn't understand why my mappings weren't working only to find that it was due to having to use the hotkey editor in a specific way). I really think a good keymapping is the first hurdle people have to overcome, so shipping it with an hotkey extension for Sublime, VSCode, etc. would be a big win off the line.

The autocomplete and jump to definition seemed to work well. I had a hard time figuring out if "Find references" were working. It kept telling me to go to some obscure tab or place somewhere but since it's all symbols, I don't know where to actually go. VSCode is easy by comparison - a "peek" window shows up prioritized references.

However, Nova is a no-go for me because it simply stalls when opening a >2 MB JSON files. Forget about trying to search-replace - it's simply too slow. In defense of Nova, Sublime also can't deal with it.

My impression going away from Nova is: It's like Xcode and VSCode had a baby. Perhaps with time it'll improve in performance and be fine tuned to a point where I can use it daily - but given it's primarily paid (not "free with nag screen" like sublime), I can't review it any time soon again.


I see. So I think I won't be giving it a shot too, at least for now. Let's see where Nova evolves, if it does. If it becomes some obscure hipster tool where developers with some niche need use, I'll leave it alone. If the baby of Xcode and Vscode grows up to be a wonderful, mature IDE, sure, I'll give it a try.

Thank you for your detailed review, greatly appreciated!




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