Howl 0.3 Released

The eagerly awaited 0.3 release of the Howl editor is finally here! Packed with new features and numerous enhancements, the 0.3 release takes a few big strides towards 1.0. You can download the latest version here. Highlights of this release are below and the full changelog since 0.2.1 is included at the bottom of this blog post.

It’s been a while since the 0.2.1 release, but that does not mean that development has been idling. Apart from the many things already packed in the 0.3 release, a lot of work has been put into a new, custom written editing engine code-named ‘aullar’. The 0.3 release marks the last Howl release to use the Scintilla editing engine - starting with 0.4 and going forward the new editing engine will be used. We’ll write more about the new editing engine in upcoming blog entries, so stay tuned!

External commands

You can now run external commands from within the editor and view the output in a buffer using two new commands - exec and project-exec. The implementation is completely non-blocking so you can continue to edit other files while your external command is running. See the manual for more information and this earlier blog post for a nice demo of this feature.

Here is screenshot showing the external command prompt in action:

Revamped command line API

The readline and inputs API has been completely revamped and replaced with a new CommmandLine and interactions APIs.

New and improved commands

The buffer-replace command is now interactive and displays a preview, while allowing selective exclusion of matches from replacement. A new command buffer-replace-regex allows replacements of text that matches a given regular expression. See the manual for more information.

Here is a screenshot showing buffer-replace in action:

Both project-open and buffer-switch commands now show a preview of the selected buffer or file.

A new project-build command executes a pre-configured build command from the current project’s root directory.

New bundles

The Python, Nim and PHP programming languages now have proper bundles supporting lexing and language specific modes.

Full Changelog since 0.2.1

New and improved

• Added a new command, project-build that executes a pre-configured command from the projects root directory (using the command configured in the new project_build_command variable).

• New Nim bundle (lexing, structure, etc)

• New Python bundle (lexing, structure, etc). Replaces the old basic Python mode.

• Lexer fixes: Ruby, C/C++, HTML, HAML

• Lisp and sub modes: Better indentation support

• Added previews for the switch-buffer and project-open commands.

• HTML mode: Sub lex inline styling

• Upgrade to LuaJIT 2.0.4

• Upgrade to Moonscript 0.3.1

• Replaced the readline and input system with a new command line and interactions system resulting in new API.

• Updated the buffer-replace command and added a new buffer-replace-regex command. Both show live previews of replacements and allow selective exclusion.

• Command history is now recorded and can be viewed by using the up key from the command line. Previously run commands can be re-run by selecting them from the history.

• New PHP bundle, featuring a new PHP mode with advanced syntax highlighting.

• The describe-key command now shows the commands bound to the key press.

• Added indirect bindings support to keymaps using the binding_for field.

• Added a new comprehensive API for launching and controlling external processes (howl.io.Process).

• Added two new commands for launching external processes: exec and project-exec. The former opens up a prompt for launching an external process from the directory of the current file (if available), whereas the latter launches an external process from the base directory of the current project. Both opens up a new process buffer for displaying any process output (ANSI color sequences supported).

• Substituted certain key names to avoid ambiguity, e.g. alt_l now gets substituted for altL so that pressing left alt is distinguishable from pressing alt + l (issue #29)

• VI:

  • Refuse to enter INSERT mode for a read-only buffer
  • Bind ? to buffer-search-backward

• Added new method, Buffer.save_as(file), for associating with and saving a buffer’s content to a specified file.

• Added new function, bindings.binding_for, for finding a binding for a particular action.

• Added a new StyledText (howl.ui.StyledText) class in the API, used for holding a chunk of text along with corresponding styles. ActionBuffer now supports inserting or appending such instances. Along with this a new simple markup parser was added (Howl Markup, howl.ui.markup.howl) that can be used to easily create StyledText instances.

• Added a new command buffer-search-backward that implements an interactive search for the text typed by the user, backwards from the cursor position. Bound this command to ctrl_r.

• Enabled jumping to the next or previous match while an interactive search is running. The bindings for buffer-search-backward or buffer-search-forward (ctrl_r and ctrl_f by default) are used for this while either command is active.

• Added two new commands buffer-search-word-backward and buffer-search-word-forward that do an exact word match, using the configured word pattern, for the current word at cursor. Bound these commands to ctrl_comma and ctrl_period.

• Updated interactive buffer-search-backward and buffer-search-forward commands to highlight all matches on screen in addition to the primary match. Added a new highlight style called search_secondary for the non primary matches.

• Ruby: Update lexer to properly lex bare general delimited strings, e.g. my_string = %{string here}.

Bugs fixed

• A slew of issues as seen on Github

• Fix highlighting of “bad braces”, i.e. braches for which no match could be found.

API changes

• The old readline API was significantly revamped for this release, with changes too numerous to list here. The documentation for the new readline module is a good starting point for seeing how the new API looks.

• Buffer.file: Assigning a new file causes the buffer contents to always be reloaded, regardless of the modification status. If the file does not exist, the buffer’s contents will be emptied.

• Buffer.reload(): reload now takes an additional parameter, force, that allows reloading a buffer even if the buffer is currently modified.

• Buffer.find(), Buffer.rfind(): new methods that implement forward and reverse search on the entire buffer text, or starting at init argument if provided. These methods work with character offsets.

• ustring.urfind(), ustring.rfind(): new methods that implement reverse search for a given string within the string. The urfind method uses character offsets while rfind uses byte offsets.

Deprecations removed

Command names deprecated in the 0.2 release have now been removed.