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Add to SafariWhen comparing Howl vs Suplemon, the Slant community recommends Howl for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Howl is ranked 21st while Suplemon is ranked 51st. 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 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
Pro Native multi cursor editing on the command line
Multiple cursors & column selection allow versatile ways of editing.
Pro Low learning curve
Does not drown you in keyboard shortcuts or non-intuitive use-concepts as you start using it, but high-level functionality can still be easily accessed when the need for it arises.
Pro Mouse support
Scroll wheel works automatically. With mouse mode (F8) the cursor can be moved with a left-click to a desired position, and new cursors can be added with right clicks.
Pro No required dependencies
Pro Shows linting messages for Python code (requires flake8)
Cons
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.
Con No region selection
Some selection features that are taken for granted in other editors are missing here. As they say in their documentation, if you want to copy and paste part of a line, you need to use the mouse to select it and copy with Ctrl + Shift + C.
