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For those like me wondering what it is:
Geany is a small and lightweight Integrated Development Environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. Another goal was to be as independent as possible from a special Desktop Environment like KDE or GNOME - Geany only requires the GTK3 runtime libraries.
Finally!
Even their own website won’t tell you.
Lots of people are TRYING to leave windows and go to Linux. Please keep posting these informative descriptions.
It’s verbatim from their about page. It’s awesome quinkin added it here for us, though!
This warms my heart, because it was one of my first IDEs. Way back in like 2006 I think.
The best notepad++ replacement on linux
What about KDE’s Kate?
Awesome. Been using geany for a while. Geany and htop are mandatory for me.
I want to like geany. However, its just not customizable and it lacks support for a lot of things.
not customizable
themes, plugins, ridiculously easy custom configurations/build commands etc you can even control the window manager from config files if you want to, its insanely customisable
lacks support for a lot of things
edit: trying to sound less snarky, but do you have a lot of examples?
i could see these criticisms arising from a quick glance. or we may have slightly different definitions of these terms. which is fair enough.
imo geany’s ratio of features to weight is remarkable, perhaps singularly so?
I just know I wasn’t able to get code suggestions, highlighting or error highlighting working. There might be a way but I spend a bunch of time on it and accomplished nothing. If there is a way it isn’t obvious
suggestions should work by default, if by which you mean basic completion of names etc
anyway fair enough, its not for everyone.
sorry for being a bit overly defensive, i just really love geany lol
I want to like geany. However, its just not customizable and it lacks support for a lot of things.
I would say it is customizable, but I think it is relatively difficult to customize compared to a lot of other editors (e.g. Emacs). I think Geany is a nice, free/libre alternative to VSCode, and about as difficult to customize as VSCode, but does not have quite as many extensions available for it due to the fact that unlike VSCode, Geany is not supported by a multi-billion dollar company with the goal of embracing, extending, and extinguishing all other competing editors.
Geany Extensions are written in C which is not a scripting language and so unlike in Emacs you can’t just write a quick 2 or 3 line script like you would in Emacs to solve some unique text-editing problem.
Geany does have extensions for Python and Lua scripting, but there is almost no ecosystem of Lua or Python scripts, and trying to access the editor features from Lua or Python requires deep knowledge of the Geany Gtk3 API. Compare this to something like the “Lite” text editor which has the whole user interface written in Lua, and therefore you can write fairly elaborate text editing scripts and user interfaces entirely in Lua. You just cannot do this with Geany.
Wow. 18 years of development yet it has a smaller version number than most versioned distros. Finally someone doing semantic versioning!
Nice!
I ignored Geany for years.
Sometimes it came preinstalled, so I knew about it. I didn’t program, why would I need more than, say, whatever the basic text editor was?
Then I found myself in the position of only having one working computer (other than my company-provided laptop): a raspberry pi 400. The Raspberry Pi Desktop (Debian) comes with Geany preinstalled and I just started using it one day. I got it. It is light, it has some extra options, plugins, themes… Looking forward to updating later to see if there are any big changes.
What a nice milestone. Congrats to the devs. I tried a lot of IDEs but geany is just simple and perfect.
