When comparing Howl vs BBEdit, the Slant community recommends Howl for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Howl is ranked 20th while BBEdit is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Howl is:
Howl is very intuitive and easy to use.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to use
Howl is very intuitive and easy to use.
Pro Fast startup
It's extremely lightweight, making it start up pretty quickly.
Pro Keyboard driven
You don't need the mouse to use Howl. Everything can be accomplished with commands and shortcuts.
Pro Language tooling
Has built-in functionality for completion, inline documentation and linting so IDE-like features can be added easily.
Pro Open source
Howl is an open source project and is actively developed on GitHub(howl-editor/howl). It has a MIT license.
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 UI Focused on editting
Non distracted icons, toolbars, pannels, extra spacing, etc.
Pro Easy to extend
Plugins (bundles) can be written in Lua or MoonScript.
Pro Works on OpenBSD
Pro Stable development, been around for decades.
BBEdit is commercial software, the paid counterpart to their free application Textwrangler. Though BBEdit comes off as pricey, this allows for stable and consistent updates from the developers. BBEdit has been around since 1992.
Pro Can open very large files
Pro Built-in FTP/SFTP browser
BBEdit can open files directly from, and save them to, any available FTP server. It can also open and save files directly via SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol).
Pro Just about every feature is already built in
No searching for plug-ins that may or may not work.
Pro Great customer support
The developer is very responsive to bug reports and feature suggestions.
Pro Great JAMStack environment
You can build the static site of your dreams without needing any external assistants. Although it does not process LESS, SASS, or SCSS files, BBEdit's includes are very powerful.
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 Expensive
It's US$49.99 a single user license