When comparing Howl vs Coda, the Slant community recommends Howl for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors for a Mac with a GUI?” Howl is ranked 14th while Coda is ranked 19th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion 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 Live Preview mode
Makes styling a site in CSS simpler.
Pro Built-in FTP client
Publishing your changes to the web server is a one-click operation. That is, one click per file, or one click for all your changed files. Or even cherry-pick the files to be published in the next batch.
Pro Built-in support for Git and Subversion
Although the software doesn't ship with these libraries, it does work once you have one installed.
Pro Mature
Coda has been developed by Panic exclusively for Mac since 2007. The experience of the developers shows in the stability and polish of their product.
Pro Many plugins available
There is a huge library of user-created plugins, ranging from additional syntax modes, to code validation and beautification, to reference materials, code snippets, text actions and more.
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 Hasn't been updated in 2 years.
Con Expensive
The price of $99 is more than many other editors.