Meridian's setup wizard imports a .novabackup file directly. Your layout comes across and you tweak from there, instead of laying out sixty icons again from an empty grid.
What the import brings over
Your pages and what is on them, your folders and your dock, arranged the way Nova had them. What it cannot bring is anything that has no equivalent — Nova-specific settings map onto Meridian's where a match exists and fall back to Meridian's default where it does not. Expect to spend a few minutes on icon size and grid afterwards, not an evening on layout.
Once you are in, Meridian's own backup file holds everything — layout, settings, icon edits, gestures, Spaces — so you never have to do a migration blind again.
What you get that Nova did not have
- Spaces — whole home screens, each with its own pages, dock, folders, grid and icon style, that switch on a schedule or a trigger with the screen off
- An assistant that applies settings in plain words, showing every change old-to-new with Undo
- Orbit — a radial menu widget for apps and actions
- A gesture pad you draw shapes on, on top of sixteen assignable triggers
- KLWP and KWGT that behave — forwarded touches, stable offsets, Kustom's delayed provider handled
Being straight with you
Meridian is not a Nova clone and does not try to be. If what you want is Nova exactly as it was, no alternative will give you that, and you are better off staying put while it still runs. If what you want is the kind of control Nova gave you, on something actively developed — the changelog is every release in full, so you can judge the pace for yourself — then the import is there to make trying it easy.