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Add to SafariWhen comparing Synwrite vs Howl, the Slant community recommends Howl for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Howl is ranked 21st while Synwrite is ranked 65th. The most important reason people chose Howl is:
You don't need the mouse to use Howl. Everything can be accomplished with commands and shortcuts.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Clean interface
Synwrite has a clean and beautiful UI.
Pro Small size and portable
Synwrite's small size makes it very portable and usable even from a USB flash drive.
Pro Built-in FTP support
Built-in support for FTP allows the user to transfer and exchange files between different computers and accounts.
Pro Keyboard driven
You don't need the mouse to use Howl. Everything can be accomplished with commands and shortcuts.
Pro Fast startup
It's extremely lightweight, making it start up pretty quickly.
Pro Easy to use
Howl is very intuitive and easy to use.
Pro Easy to extend
Plugins (bundles) can be written in Lua or MoonScript.
Pro UI Focused on editting
Non distracted icons, toolbars, pannels, extra spacing, etc.
Pro Language tooling
Has built-in functionality for completion, inline documentation and linting so IDE-like features can be added easily.
Pro Command line palette
Search for your commands in an easy way and see in the list which key-strokes are mapped to which commands
Pro Open source
Howl is an open source project and is actively developed on GitHub(howl-editor/howl). It has a MIT license.
Pro Works on OpenBSD
Cons
Con Windows only
Synwrite is only available for Windows and it's not cross-platform.
Con Lack of Lua examples
Although Howl can be extended in both Lua and MoonScript, almost all bundles are written in MoonScript. This means that it is a bit harder to find examples if you'd rather write your bundle in Lua. MoonScript can be compiled to Lua but the code won't be as clean and understandable as if it would've been written in Lua by hand.
