Howl 0.4 released!

We are very happy to announce the release of Howl 0.4 - a major milestone in the march towards 1.0! Highlights of this release are below and the full changelog since 0.3 is included at the bottom of this blog post.

New editing engine

This highlight of this release is the switch to aullar - a custom-built editing engine for Howl. Written in Moonscript, Aullar enables new features for Howl and is easier to customize than the Scintilla engine it replaces. While the intention for the 0.4 release was to provide the bare minimum of features needed for replacing Scintilla, there are a number of new features and capabilities resulting from the switch. You can read a lot more about the new editing engine, including some history and highlights of new features here.

New themes and theming possibilities

With the new editing engine in place, the surrounding theming support was reworked to allow for more advanced themes. Since 0.3 Howl now has three new built-in themes to choose from: Monokai, Steinom and Blueberry Blend. The first of these, Monokai, is the new default theme starting with 0.4:

The second one, Steinom, shows off some of the new theming possibilities such as background images and transparency:

New bundles

A new Pascal bundle was added with lexing and indentation support, etc., replacing the old basic Pascal bundle.

Go language got proper support in Howl, with support for syntax highlighting, autocompletion (using gocode ) and auto formatting:

New and improved commands

The open command file browser got a few enhancements - it now shows previews while browsing, displays icons next to filenames and also supports recursive directory search which can be toggled by pressing ctrl_s . Illustrated by the below screenshot using the new Blueberry Blend theme:

Many new commands were added, including open-recent to find recently closed files, cursor-goto-brace to jump between brace pairs, cursor-goto-line to jump to a given line number, buffer-grep-exact and buffer-grep-regex for advanced buffer searches.

Buffer management for the lazy

Opening new buffers aren’t typically that much of a chore (and even less so in 0.4 with the new open-recent command), but closing them can be tedious. As a result, it’s easy to end up with some 100+ buffers open after some time even though they’re no longer of interest. Fortunately, starting with 0.4 Howl will now automatically close old buffers for you. The manual contains more information about how this is handled.

Full Changelog since 0.3

New and improved

Added a new theme ‘Blueberry Blend’

New Pascal bundle (lexing, indentation support, etc). Replaces the old basic Pascal mode.

Added a new command, cursor-goto-brace for moving cursor to matching brace.

Changed brace highlighting logic to match braces of same styles only.

New Go bundle (lexing, autocompletion and formatting).

Added icons for buffer listings.

Undo now resets the buffer modified flag if it reaches the original revision.

Added a new theme, monokai . This will be the new default theme, starting with the 0.4 release.

Added a new theme, steinom .

Added a new function sys.time() which returns the POSIX time for the system with microsecond resolution.

Added a new module, ‘janitor’, which automatically closes old buffers and tries to release memory back to the OS. The buffer closing is controlled by two new configuration variables, cleanup_min_buffers_open and cleanup_close_buffers_after .

Added a new command, cursor-goto-line for going to a specified line.

Added Timer.on_idle, for performing operations upon idle.

Added a new property, Application.idle, for determining how long the application has been idle.

Added new configuration variable, undo_limit , for controlling the maximum number of revisions for each buffer.

Added the open-recent command, bound to ctrl_shift_o , to show a list of recently closed files and let the user select one to re-open.

Added buffer-grep-exact and buffer-grep-regex commands similar to buffer-grep but using exact and regular expression matches, respectively.

Changed how Howl loads files specified on the command line. Previously files were loaded in different views, and now they’re all loaded with one file being shown (issue #123).

Added recursive listing feature to file interactions. Pressing ctrl_s in the open command now toggles between recursive and regular list of files.

Added custom font support and Font Awesome icons for file listings.

Added two new configuration variables for line wrapping: line_wrapping_navigation line_wrapping_symbol

Upgrade LuaJIT to LuaJIT-2.1.0-beta1

Added new bundle, ‘mail-mode’.

Added support for loading user configuration from a XDG Base Directory compliant directory. It’s not the default, but will be used if ~/.howl is not present and the XDG directory is.

Added previews for the open command.

Replaced the old editing engine Scintilla with a new custom written engine, code-named aullar .

The howl-moon-eval command was improved by automatically adjusting the indentation levels to work as a stand-alone code chunk.

Keymap changes

Changed ctrl_w to run buffer-close instead of view-close . Added ctrl_shift_w for view-close .

Bugs fixed

Issues as seen on Github

API changes