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Add to SafariWhen comparing Howl vs Gedit, the Slant community recommends Howl for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Howl is ranked 21st while Gedit is ranked 22nd. 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 Plugins allow for added functionality and customization
There are tons of plugins for productivity available in many different workflows, such as a dictation plugin, an encryption add-on, a whitespace remover, and more.
Pro Great UI
The UI is lean and minimal. Everything feels quite fast and it is easy to add custom shortcuts for doing things like compiling, deploying, or testing.
Pro Available on all systems that use Gnome
Gedit is the official text editor for Gnome and it's available wherever any version of Gnome is installed. With thousands of people using it daily and not even realizing it.
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 Last line bug
Sometimes the last line of text is not visible.
Con Confusing interface
For example, finding anything in the settings menu is hard. Most other text editors use Edit->Preferences for managing settings but this is not the case for Gedit.
Con Faster than Atom but Slower than Geany
Not bad editor. Very similar to Geany, but Geany works faster and has more features.
Con Not a lot of features
Gedit is a text editor. Though it's simple and fast, it misses a lot of features, most notably auto-complete for several languages.
