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Add to SafariWhen comparing Howl vs Chocolat, 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 Chocolat is ranked 20th. 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 Built-in access to MDN
Chocolat offers integrated web-based documentation, so you can quickly look up anything you might need clarification on.
Pro Unlimited split viewing
Chocolat allows you to view as many files side-by-side as you'd like, rather than limiting you to two.
Pro Live error checking
Chocolat supports live error checking.
Pro Great look
The native Mac looks awesome.
Pro Excellent theme support
Themes can be tweaked in various ways, such as in terms of font-size, colors, and highlighting colors.
Pro Code completion
Chocolat will auto-complete JS variables, keywords, methods, functions, and parameters.
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 Mac only
Chocolate is only available for Mac.
Con Commercial
