Nova is pretty, and I'm impressed that they've added a Vim mode, although I haven't been able to really give it a try (my year expired before that was added!). But for me, it wasn't just a lack of plugins, it was that functionality I wanted wasn't there and the functionality that was front and center, like integrated Transmit and Terminal tabs, just wasn't that important to me.
I have very specific and weird needs. For example, I need syntax highlighting for LaTeX, but in a non-mathematic-but-programmatic-control-of-layout way.
VS Code supports that, oddly enough. No other text editor does.
A shame, as they claimed to fix some of this in the newer versions... but of course my 30 day trial has expired and their model means I can't try out the fixes to see if it's actually worth paying for now.
Maybe they're really targeting a different audience.
I really, really wanted to use Nova, would have paid full price no problem, but for some reason the one main Python plugin was extremely flaky for me. Linter highlighting would sometimes work and sometimes not, unaffected by the plugin settings, and the primary Python plugin I was using was based on somebody’s github repro that hadn’t been touched in a year or two.
I spent a bunch of time but couldn’t figure it out. So I ended up going to VS Code. It works well. The Python plugins work well. It’s a pain in the behind to configure, and it’s not the prettiest thing to look at. But I can grind out working code fast, partially because those plugins catch problems almost as fast as I can type them.
I would try Nova again in a heartbeat if the Python support improves.
But I actually recently wrote a todo to try out PyCharm Pro. I haven't decided if that's pointless yak shaving since VSC works pretty well for me. But I would like to configure VSC more to make my workflow faster. And my guess is PyCharm Pro is probably better out of the box vs having to spend time configuring VSC settings (so many settings...) and plugins.
Once you've got it set up and then committed your process to muscle memory, the speed makes the software recede and your work the focus.
(_The Pragmatic Programmer_, a book I highly recommend, advised me to "use a single editor well" and that has really made a huge difference in my career. I don't look for new tools until the current ones go unsupported or perform poorly—looking at you jEdit and TextMate—and my work flows are ingrained.)
In the end, though... I switched back to VS Code. Native apps like this are much faster than such things, but I had too many use cases for the plugins.
Kind of the same experience as Sublime Text. It's _really fast_, but I just rely too much on plugins when the experience requires something more than vim.