Apache NetBeans vs. Emacs vs. JavaScript vs. Nova Comparison Chart

At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. Content-aware editing modes, including syntax coloring, for many file types. Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users. Full Unicode support for nearly all human scripts. Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface. A wide range of functionality beyond text editing, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, IRC client, and more. A packaging system for downloading and installing extensions. Built-in support for arbitrary-size integers. Text shaping with HarfBuzz. Native support for JSON parsing. Better support for Cairo drawing. Portable dumping used instead of unexec. Support for XDG conventions for init files. Additional early-init initialization file. Built-in support for tab bar and tab-line. Support for resizing and rotating of images without ImageMagick.

If we're being honest, Mac apps are a bit of a lost art. There are great reasons to make cross-platform apps — to start, they're cross-platform — but it's just not who we are. Founded as a Mac software company in 1997, our joy at Panic comes from building things that feel truly, well, Mac-like. Long ago, we created Coda, an all-in-one Mac web editor that broke new ground. But when we started work on Nova, we looked at where the web was today, and where we needed to be. It was time for a fresh start. It all starts with our first-class text-editor. It's new, hyper-fast, and flexible, with all the features you want: smart autocomplete, multiple cursors, a Minimap, editor overscroll, tag pairs and brackets, and way, way more. For the curious, Nova has built-in support for CoffeeScript, CSS, Diff, ERB, Haml, HTML, INI, JavaScript, JSON, JSX, Less, Lua, Markdown, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Sass, SCSS, Smarty, SQL, TSX, TypeScript, XML, and YAML.