I don’t know about JetBrains but I have tried to replicate my VSCode + Remote Containers extension workflow in vim and Nova (which I absolutely love) and not got anywhere near.
Would you mind describing a few of the things you like about Nova IDE? I never tried it, but it has my interest. I'd be happy to hear what you like and dislike about it.
I don't really know how to describe it - it just "feels" better. Which isn't very objective I know, but is important for an app that I spend several hours a day in.
There's some visual stuff:
The default views, font choices and colours are really nicely put together (and I've tried tweaking VSCode to match but I can't get it to look as nice). For example, when viewing a git diff, it displays sweeping curves, which move and bend as you scroll, connecting the changes on both sides.
There's some Panic stuff:
I like the integration with Transmit (which I use all the time). And I used to use the "publish" function all the time (develop on macOS and push to a Linux box to run tests etc).
And there's the fact that it's a native Mac app - I'm an old-school Mac user and there's a definite difference in "feel" between Mac apps and others. I'm not a purist about it (I have tons of Electron stuff installed), but when I use a Mac app I notice it. Plus I often get VSCode randomly slowing down to a crawl causing lots of annoying type-ahead, which doesn't happen with Nova - which I guess is a combination of Electron, JS and extensions combining.
But Panic has a reputation for sweating the details and it shows throughout the UI. Plus I feel good supporting a tiny company working in a niche market.
But functionality-wise it falls way short of VSCode - especially with extensions and dev-containers. The way VSCode + Remote Docker Containers feels like you're developing locally when actually everything is happening in a container on a Linux box somewhere halfway across the world is quite amazing.
