The Nova project is restarting from scratch, carrying forward lessons learned into an entirely new ecosystem: Rust and Tauri.
What was previously referred to as the Nova IDE is now the Novi Editor. Novi is a vi-style editor with strong terminal support, Git integration, and a file tree. Additional features such as ChatGPT Codex support and SSH terminal support are planned for the future.
During development, we hadn’t yet implemented the Nova Agile Specification workflow or the AI agent orchestration mechanisms that were central to Nova’s original vision. As the project evolved, it became clear that this environment wasn’t the right foundation for Nova itself. The Monaco editor and command palette began to feel too close to VS Code. More importantly, I found myself using the application daily as my main terminal emulator environment — and genuinely enjoying it in that role.
Novi was actually envisioned earlier, but the idea was scrapped at the time because I didn’t want to maintain two Electron projects simultaneously. In hindsight, it’s clear that our Nova prototype was always meant to become Novi. It wasn't really a true IDE then and will not try to be one — it’s a vi editor and terminal environment with some carefully chosen bells and whistles.
This also means Novi can be released much sooner than Nova ever could have been. I hope you enjoy using it as much as I do. Novi will be available on lyric-lang.org when it’s ready and will be available as an alternative development environment for Lyric.
I’m very pleased with this direction and excited to learn a new language for myself in the process: Rust. Now I finally have the right excuse to do so.
— Michael (Aeonath)