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.
Key Features
- 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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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |
It’s a pity this is dead, as it is amazing! Blazingly fast when opeing multiple large files.
Open source software is never really dead.