Howl 0.5 released!

We are very happy to announce the release of Howl 0.5! Highlights of this release are below and the full changelog since 0.4 is included at the bottom of this blog post.

Code inspection support

Code inspections integrates various types of annotations, typically from linters and similar checkers, directly into Howl:

The 0.5 release ships with built-in inspection support for

• Lua (using luacheck)
• Moonscript (using moonpick)
• Ruby (using the interpreter’s built-in syntax checking)

Support for more languages will likely come in the future. It’s easy to add support for your own custom inspectors as well using the new inspect API.

Revamped configuration system

Howl has always had a pretty flexible configuration system, allowing you to set configuration for different layers: globally, for a specific mode or a specific buffer. With 0.5 this is cranked up a notch, as it’s now possible to set configuration not only for the aforementioned layers, but for different type of scopes as well. Having scopes allows you to specify configuration for a particular file for instance, or all files below a particular directory. Or files using a particular mode below a particular directory.. It makes for a very powerful and flexible configuration system, and is something that future releases is likely to build upon, e.g. to introduce project specific configuration, etc.

You can read more about the new configuration system in the manual.

New bundles

• A new Rust bundle was added with lexing and indentation support.

• A new Cython bundle provides syntax and structure support for Cython code.

• A new Dart bundle provides syntax and structure support for Dart code.

New and improved commands

• Added new commands editor-move-text-left and editor-move-text-right, bound to alt_left and alt_right by default. These move the current character or selected text left or right by one character while preserving the selection.

• Added new commands editor-move-lines-up and editor-move-lines-down, bound to alt_up and alt_down by default. These move the current or selected lines up (or down) by one line while preserving the selection.

• Added new command, editor-replace-exec, for replacing selection or buffer content with the result of piping it to an external command.

Full Changelog since 0.4

New and improved

• New Dart bundle for Dart code.

• Make fixes to let OpenBSD build cleanly (thanks @oficial)

• Various improvements for VI mode

• Code inspection support for Lua using luacheck

• Code inspection support for Ruby using Ruby interpreter

• Code inspection support for Moonscript using moonpick

• Support for a new inspections framework (i.e. linting).

• New Rust bundle provides syntax and structure support for Rust code.

• Added --version command line flag.

• Bundles can now declare dependencies on other modules using the require_bundle helper function.

• Bundles can now expose modules using provide_module helper function.

• LuaJIT was updated to LuaJIT-2.1.0-beta3

• Theme compatibility fixes for newer Gtk versions

• Quiet Gtk size allocation warnings in newer Gtk versions

• Added support for X11 primary selection (e.g. copy & paste using middle button).

• New Cython bundle provides syntax and structure support for Cython code.

• breaking - Default for line-padding setting has been changed to 0. If you’ve relied on it: set it explicitly to its' previous value 1 in your Howl configuration.

• breaking - Overhauled the configuration system to use a flexible scope and layer structure. Replaced all ‘set*’ commands with a new set command as part of this. See the documentation for more details.

• Added config.save_config_on_exit variable to automatically save global configuration to ~/.howl/system/config.lua.

• Added the save-config command that saves the current global configuration to ~/.howl/system/config.lua.

• Changed undo coalescing to not be as greedy (e.g. coalescing pastes and ordinary edit revisions).

• Added custom_draw flair type (highlight.CUSTOM).

• Added command line help which is invoked by pressing f1 while any interactive command is running. This displays a popup containing information about the command.

• Added new commands editor-move-text-left and editor-move-text-right, bound to alt_left and alt_right by default. These move the current character or selected text left or right by one character while preserving the selection.

• Added new commands editor-move-lines-up and editor-move-lines-down, bound to alt_up and alt_down by default. These move the current or selected lines up (or down) by one line while preserving the selection.

• Bundled all required dependencies for running specs: ./bin/howl-spec can now be run without any type of external dependecy.

• Upgrade Moonscript to 0.5.0

• Added new command, editor-replace-exec, for replacing selection or buffer content with the result of piping it to an external command.

Bugs fixed

• Issues as seen on Github