Compiling Sass Automatically in Nova

Since Nova was released, I’ve been using VideCode’s Sass extension to automatically compile my Sass files into css. It’s the only extension that exists for compiling Sass in Nova, apparently.

The irritating thing about it was that its settings were global, so the input and output paths you defined would be applied to every project in which you edited Sass in. My projects all have slightly different structures, so that wasn’t flexible enough for me. I ended up disabling the plugin and using a custom build action script to just run sass, and a run action script to run sass --watch. That worked pretty well, but I don’t want my run script blocked by sass --watch if it needs to be running Node or Docker.

I submitted a pull request today for the Sass extension that enables per-project settings, and with that, Nova is almost perfect for 99% of my web/server development.

Nova still has some stability/reliability issues for me, but the way everything is so well thought-out and Mac-like¹ — even in the extensions API — is really excellent. It totally clicks with the way I expect things to work on my Mac (which is a major reason I never gave up Coda for something like VS Code that had these capabilities years ago).