Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariHowl vs Femto Emacs
When comparing Howl vs Femto Emacs, the Slant community recommends Howl for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source text editors for programming?” Howl is ranked 23rd while Femto Emacs is ranked 37th. 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 Well documented
A long and well written tutorial teaches how to program in femtolisp and write extensions for Femto Emacs.
Pro Highly compatible with Emacs
If you know Emacs, you can start using Femto Emacs immediately.
Pro Very small footprint
The size of the executable file and the femtolisp library add up to only 500 k. The C source code is also small and well documented, so one can easily modify it. You can also use the source code to learn how to program a text editor.
Pro Very fast startup time
For small files, Femto Emacs starts up faster than emacs or vim.
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 syntax coloring for Latex
The distribution comes with syntax coloring examples for many languages, like Haskell, C, Lisp, Python, etc. However, there is no scheme for Latex. If you need syntax coloring for Latex, you will need to add your own color scheme.
Con Source distribution only
Femto Emacs is distributed only in source form. Therefore, you need to install ncurses, gcc and compile it with make and make install. There is no binary distribution. If you want mouse support, you need to program it in femtolisp or in C. This should not be a problem if you are a programmer, but can become an issue if you don't know Lisp or C. If you want to use femtolisp on Windows, you will need mingw and ncurses.
