Howl is a general purpose, fast and lightweight open source editor with a keyboard-centric minimalistic user interface. Howl aims to combine fast startup times and a small footprint.
While Howl uses GTK, its interface is primarily text oriented. Files are opened from the command line, using commands.
Howl has a minimal C core, and has some dependencies written in C as well. The software is built on LuaJIT, Moonscript, LPeg, and Busted.
Features include:
- Minimalistic user interface driven mainly by the keyboard.
- View more than one buffer at a time by supporting multiple open views.
- Regular expression search/replace.
- Code inspections integrates various types of annotations, typically from linters and similar checkers, directly into How. Built-in inspection for Lua, Moonscript, and Ruby.
- Flexible configuration system, allowing you to set configuration for different layers: globally, for a specific mode or a specific buffer.
- Syntax and structure support for many languages.
- Support for X11 primary selection (e.g. copy & paste using middle button).
- Custom-built editing engine for Howl. Written in Moonscript, Aullar enables new features for Howl and is easier to customize.
- Built-in themes: Monokai, Steinom and Blueberry Blend.
- Good buffer management.
- Run external commands from within the editor and view the output in a buffer. Howl provides two different commands: exec and project-exec.
- Command line API.
- Ability to use custom fonts.
- Use Vim keybindings.
Website: howl.io
Support: Documentation, Blog, FAQ, Gitter, GitHub Code Repository
Developer: The Howl Developers
License: MIT License
Howl is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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