Installing Howl

Howl is developed on Linux, but it builds on other *NIX platforms as well such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD (with other *BSDs presumably requiring only little work). It should be possible to port to OSX or Windows, should any brave soul be willing to put in the work.

You can install Howl by building it from source, either from a release or by cloning the repository from Github.

Latest release

The latest release of Howl is 0.6. It was released at 2019-04-05, and is available for download from:

https://github.com/howl-editor/howl/releases/download/0.6/howl-0.6.tgz

MD5: a47e8cc7c1f07de150b3320247f0daa5

SHA1: 912142d37ce20b3d87d9fb5ba548faec924d8856

Release notes: Howl 0.6 Released

Building Howl from source

Build requirements

Howl requires the following build dependencies:

curl or wget: For auto-downloading build dependencies (only needed when building from a code checkout, as the release tarball contains pre-downloaded dependencies).
GTK+: Version >= 3, with development files.

For example:
- On Debian-based based systems you would need the libgtk-3-dev package.
- For Fedora you would need the gtk3-devel package.
C compiler: Howl has a very small C core itself, and it embedds a few dependencies built in C.

If you’re running Linux and have Flatpak, all you need is flatpak-builder.

Downloading the sources

Download and unpack a Howl release, or get the source from Github, either by cloning the repository or by download a Zip-file of the desired branch/tag.

Building

Compile Howl by issuing make from the src directory (gmake for *BSD). When building directly from a source checkout, in-app dependencies will automatically be downloaded for you using wget. Once it’s built, you can if you want run it directly as is from the src directory, like so: $ ./howl. To install it properly however, so that it integrates into your desktop, you’ll want to run the make install command.

Example session:

[nilnor@cohen:~/tmp]% git clone https://github.com/howl-editor/howl.git
Cloning into 'howl'...
remote: Counting objects: 7924, done.
[..]
Checking connectivity... done
[nilnor@cohen:~/tmp]%
[nilnor@cohen:~/tmp]% cd howl/src/
[nilnor@cohen:~/tmp/howl/src]% make -j 4
[snipped download and compiling]
make  49.44s user 4.21s system 81% cpu 1:05.74 total
[nilnor@cohen:~/tmp/howl/src]% sudo make install
[sudo] password for nilnor:
Installing to /usr/local..
All done.

Howl installs to /usr/local by default, but you can specify a different location to install to by specifying PREFIX to make, like so:

make PREFIX=~/.local
make PREFIX=~/.local install

NB: If you install to a non-standard location, your desktop environment might not pick up on the fact that Howl is installed, and the application icon will look ugly as the result.

Building using Flatpak

Change into the Howl source directory (which contains io.howl.Editor.yaml) and run:

flatpak-builder --force-clean --install root io.howl.Editor.yaml

This will build Howl via flatpak-builder and install it once the build is completed. Just re-run this again after a git pull to get the latest changes.

Tracking the latest from Github

We developers use Howl every day for our daily development, and we try our best to keep the master branch stable and suitable for production usage at all times. If you want to follow along with the latest updates for Howl, simply clone the repository from Github and build as per the above instructions. To update just pull the latest additions, and issue make again from the src directory. Don’t forget to make again though, as this would cause stale byte code to be loaded and confusion to arise.