Howl is described as 'General purpose editor that aims to be both lightweight and fully customizable. It is built on top of the very fast LuaJIT runtime, and can be extended in either Lua or Moonscript. It has a minimalistic UI driven mainly by the keyboard' and is a Code Editor in the development category. There are more than 100 alternatives to Howl for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD and Flathub apps. The best Howl alternative is Notepad++, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Howl are Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, VSCodium and Vim.