Overview

Visual Studio Code

Stacks186.5K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

Nova

Stacks47

Followers64

Votes3

Nova vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Introduction

Nova and Visual Studio Code are both popular code editors used by developers for writing code. While they have some similarities, there are key differences that set them apart.

Cost: Nova is a paid code editor that has a one-time cost, whereas Visual Studio Code is free and open-source, making it more accessible to developers on a limited budget.
Ecosystem: Visual Studio Code has a larger ecosystem of extensions and plugins available compared to Nova. This means that Visual Studio Code offers a wider range of functionalities and customizations options for developers.
Platform Compatibility: Nova is only available for macOS, whereas Visual Studio Code is available for multiple platforms including macOS, Windows, and Linux. This makes Visual Studio Code a more versatile choice for developers working on different operating systems.
Built-in Features: Visual Studio Code offers a built-in terminal, debugging tools, and version control integration, whereas in Nova, these features need to be installed as extensions. This makes Visual Studio Code a more comprehensive code editor out of the box.
Performance: Nova is known for its high performance and smooth user experience even with large codebases, whereas Visual Studio Code may experience some performance issues with larger projects. Nova's focus on performance makes it a preferred choice for developers who work on complex projects.
Customizability: Nova provides a more opinionated and cohesive user experience with a unified design language, while Visual Studio Code offers more customization options and the ability to tailor the editor to individual preferences. This makes Nova a more streamlined and consistent code editor, while Visual Studio Code allows for more personalized workflows.

In Summary, Nova is a paid code editor with a strong focus on performance and a streamlined user interface, while Visual Studio Code is a free and open-source code editor with a larger ecosystem of extensions and more customization options.

🔥 Trending in Code Collaboration on StackShare

GitHub

Code Collaboration

Powerful collaboration, review, and code management for open source and private development projects

Try it View Docs Alternatives

Try

137

259k

Detailed Comparison

Visual Studio Code	Nova
Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.	It is the new native code editor for Mac. It is packed with features, built for modern workflows, lightning-fast and stylish. It also has a robust extensions architecture and replaces Code for Mac.
Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience	A powerful editor; A themeable interface; Flexible workflows; Useful tools; Robust extensions
Statistics
GitHub Stars 178.2K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 35.9K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 186.5K	Stacks 47
Followers 169.1K	Followers 64
Votes 2.3K	Votes 3
Pros & Cons
Pros 341 Powerful multilanguage IDE 310 Fast 194 Front-end develop out of the box 158 Support TypeScript IntelliSense 142 Very basic but free Cons 46 Slow startup 29 Resource hog at times 20 Poor refactoring 14 Poor UI Designer 11 Weak Ui design tools	Pros 1 Fluid and Fast 1 Extensions 1 Beautiful Cons 1 Mac only
Integrations
No integrations available	ESLint TypeScript Vue.js macOS Prettier

What are some alternatives to Visual Studio Code, Nova?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

VSCodium

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

TextMate

TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.