
Geany – Lightweight IDE for Linux and Windows - ausjke
https://www.geany.org/
======
themodelplumber
I love seeing this here. I use Geany for lots of normal writing and journaling
in addition to coding projects. I have added a bunch of little tab-to-activate
snippets like inserting the date, time, and weather, inserting a random
writing prompt, inserting my global to-do list, etc.

I was just going through the prefs today and found the "invert color scheme"
option. I inverted Solarized Light and got a beautiful dark scheme I'd never
seen before as a result. Not Solarized Dark as I somehow expected :-)

~~~
ausjke
[https://github.com/codebrainz/geany-
themes](https://github.com/codebrainz/geany-themes) lots to choose from and
they're decent

------
ausjke
Have been using vscode for almost one year and love it though sometimes it is
a bit sluggish and heavy, also a long time vim user and that's what I use for
CLI editing.Still I miss Geany and keep coming back to it, it does not have
the most modern UI but it is so light-weight and does 95% editing for me all
the time.

It is packaged for Linux, and you can install the newest release with their
plugins, if you have never tried it, give it a shot.

~~~
GordonS
I came to VSCode from Visual Studio with R#, which undoubtedly affects the way
I perceive VSCode, but for me it absolutely _flies_ , even when editing 200MB
text files (not that I do that often, just saying)!

~~~
feikname
Would you mind please sharing your specs?

~~~
GordonS
Yeah, it is a monster: an HPZBook 15 G3 with a 2.9GHz Xeon E3-1545M CPU and
64GB RAM.

But even on that, Visual Studio is annoyingly slow.

I also have a 2017 13" Macbook Pro don't know the exact specs off-hand; I
don't use it often), and VSCode is really fast on that too.

------
softwarelimits
I like Geany very much, however the much better syntax highlighting of "modern
but bloated" young-people-ides ("ypis") have spoiled me.

Does anyone know of some syntax magic addon that teaches geany state-of-the-
art syntax modes, especially with mixed syntax files containing HTML, PHP,
JavaScript, Vue.js template sections?

Sublime is an excellent example of great syntax highlighting, but needs
special tuning for simple operations like "copy line" \- not really a show
stopper, but it is surprising to see how basic functionality does not come by
default with many editors still even after a very long development time - try
to toggle a comment in vim with one simple key combination...

~~~
jeffhuys
>try to toggle a comment in vim with one simple key combination...

Do you mean to say it's hard to do in vim, sublime, both or something else? In
most editors I've used (except vim), it's CMD+/ (or CTRL+/).

I probably didn't get what you mean, just wanted to make sure :)

~~~
coaxial
There is commentary for vim

------
caioariede
I feel really nostalgic about Geany. That was my favorite editor back in the
time, before I switched to Vim almost 10 years ago. It was pretty solid
already. Good to see it's doing well after all these new/modern editors
started to pop up.

~~~
hjek
I also went from Geany to Vim.

I found Geany really useful when I'd just started programming, as it has some
useful features, like file browser, symbol list and terminal window, while not
being as overwhelming as Eclipse with its project management and autogenerated
code, "marketplace" and whatnot.

------
tylerjwilk00
If you're a fan of Geany I highly recommend seeing how far you can push Gedit
[1] with plugins. You can turn this little editor into a nice lean Web
Development IDE as shown here [2]. What's nice is it's integrated with the
Gnome GVFS so you access remote file systems at the system level instead of
thru the editor's implementation. It also has an osx install option through
brew however I can't imagine the osx version would be as integrated as a
native Gnome on Linux install.

[1] [https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit)

[2] [https://www.maketecheasier.com/transform-gedit-into-a-web-
de...](https://www.maketecheasier.com/transform-gedit-into-a-web-developer-
ide/)

~~~
ausjke
In fact Geany has its own plugins (git, code navigation, ctags, terminal,
auto-close, project, to just name a few) it does 95% things I ever needed.

Also, it has multiple themes for you to choose too.

[https://github.com/codebrainz/geany-
themes](https://github.com/codebrainz/geany-themes)

Try it, it's truly great, especially for someone liked me tried things
differently and always going back, so light and fast whenever I needed, I feel
it's faster than gedit and gvim, and a lot faster (e.g. to open for editing
when you need an editor handy&quick) comparing to vscode.

------
EllipticCurve
I still use Geany every day! From writing up todo-lists at work, to
maintaining my Go, Python and C/C++ projects.

Geany is my absolute go-to editor of choice. Fast, stable and really clean
interface. Absolutely love it!!!

------
KerrickStaley
Geany is a really nice editor, similar to Sublime Text in terms of use case
(not a full IDE like e.g. Intellij), but open source. I highly recommend it
and use it almost daily :)

------
passthejoe
I still use Geany for Ruby development, and I have used it for Perl, Java and
even C++. The worst part of my first (and so far only) CS class wasn't that it
was in C++, but (for me and pretty much all in the class) grokking what
Microsoft Visual Studio (and huge IDEs in general) were all about, and how to
use them. It was a huge, unnecessary hurdle.

All you really need in a CS class is to be able to write your code, compile
and run it, and Geany does that very well for many languages. I've never been
able to do that with JavaScript/Node -- that's one language that I haven't
gotten working (as far as running it from within the editor).

One thing that didn't work so well for me was indentation/code formatting.
When you first write it in Geany, it looks good, but once you star messing
with the code, the indents can go haywire, and as far as I know there is no
way to automatically re-format the code. That's where a "real" IDE comes in, I
guess.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Have never had problems with indentation with geany in the last ten years.
Perhpas turning on view whitespace for a moment to see what is going on?

------
stevedonovan
I was a SciTE diehard but Geany is just better designed. It understands Rust
right out of the box (and well enough to mostly satisfy my needs - 'jump to
symbol' being about 80% correct). Does a nice dark theme as well. Yes, IDEA
Rust plugin is more capable, but mostly there's a joy to be left alone with
the code without all the complexity of an IDE. May not be considered _cool_
technology but I found little benefit to learning the arcane key sequences of
editors created in the 1980s.

~~~
pmarin
The text editors you are probably thinking about are from mid 70's.

~~~
gh02t
Even further back, arguably ed is the progenitor of vi and dates to 1969. Ed
and ex were where vi got its terseness from. It was designed for a teletype or
very slow modems, not an interactive terminal, which is why it was so terse.
Emacs' lineage goes back even farther to TECO from 1962; Stallman originally
implemented Emacs as a set of macros for TECO, which was highly programmable.
The original usage envisioned for TECO was that you would examine a text
printout, then devise a TECO program to transform the text to the new version,
working essentially offline since time actually using the machine was scarce.

I think it's super interesting to look at the ancestry of these tools and how
their progeny seem foreign to many people. I'm an avid vim user because it
makes sense to me, but for many it's weird and alien.

~~~
Gibbon1
I noticed that once using a 300 baud modem. The older whack tools were about
minimizing the amount data that needed to be transmitted to the terminal. And
I think as well trying to implement an editor that requires tiny amounts of
memory.

The effects of that old technology are with us still, C/C++ are one pass
languages. So you only had read the program from tape or punch cards once.

------
vageli
The interface reminds me a lot of Dev-C++ [0]

[0]: [http://bloodshed.net/](http://bloodshed.net/)

~~~
madmax108
Man, Dev-C++ was amazing! A breath of fresh air in a world of super shitty
user interfaces for coding. It's awesome to see the site still up!

I had an instant liking for Geany (which came preinstalled on a distro I was
using... Crunchbang I think), and I think now I understand why!

My workflow has moved to tmux+vim which gives you a similar visual layout as
Geany, but I'm glad to have had the opportunity to play with an editor which
was as easy to play around with as Geany!

~~~
megaman22
This may be the first time I've ever seen praise for Dev-C++... The only
reason I ever used it was because it was free, in a world where Visual C++ was
insanely expensive, and trying to get libraries and compiler toolchains setup
involved some bloodshed.

~~~
quake
When I was first learning C in engineering school, the profs were writing
their lab instructions for the free copy of Visual Studio that we got. This
still caused a headache among a number of students, so once myself and another
student found Dev-C++, it was a watershed moment for the majority of the class
that was up to this point (myself included) rather noobish, and Windows-only.

------
mr_overalls
It's my replacement for Notepad++ after I moved from Windows to Linux as my
daily driver. The balance of features, responsiveness, and simplicity work
well for me.

------
vermaden
... not only for Linux and Windows.

Geany is known to run under: Linux FreeBSD (and HardenedBSD / GhostBSD) NetBSD
OpenBSD MacOS X AIX Oracle Solaris Illumos (OpenIndiana) Windows

~~~
morganvachon
Indeed, it's my go-to GUI text editor on every platform I use (apart from
Haiku OS, though it isn't a daily use OS yet).

------
geek29
Fan of Geany using it from time when I switched to Ubuntu for last 5-6 years
both personal as well as work computers. Its very lightweight. Good to see
Geany here

------
interfixus
Smart, fast, flexible, unbloated, and with very decent handling of the
languages it knows about. Geany's one weak point is the languages it _doesn
't_ know. The process of creating a new language definition is confusing,
unclear, and finicky, very much a question of trial and a lot of error.

If not for that limitation, I probably wouldn't use anything else for my
editing needs.

~~~
ausjke
it seems knowing _lot_ of languages, which one does it not know? just curious?

also you can customize templates for "New" languages easily I think

~~~
interfixus
Sass/scss for a start. Pug (formerly Jade). Crystal. To name three I actually
use, I which I haven't got to work properly in Geany, despite any amount of
tinkering.

------
dgivney
If anyone's interested I've got a geany-lua script repo here
[https://github.com/DGivney/geany-lua-
scripts](https://github.com/DGivney/geany-lua-scripts)

~~~
kingosticks
Great, thanks, I'll take a look at some of these on Monday. I've only got a
few super simple scripts of my own but I use them all the time. A hugely
valuable feature and lua is nice and simple to pick up.

------
urlwolf
For a (better, IMO) light editor based on scintilla, try textadept. Full of
awesome. As hackable as vim and emacs, but in lua. Sane defaults. Also
terminal version.

------
osrec
I love Geany for any general text editing task as it's lightweight and fast. I
just wish its code completion was a bit more intelligent (then I could
probably ditch my current heavyweight IDE for good)

~~~
nawtacawp
what’s your heavyweight?

~~~
osrec
Eclipse, Netbeans or Atom. I cycle between those three depending on which one
is least annoying for the language I'm programming in at the time.

~~~
Filligree
Have you tried IDEA?

~~~
osrec
I haven't. Do you recommend?

~~~
Filligree
I like it a lot better than Eclipse, so yes, I think you should try it.

------
jokoon
It has most features you would expect from an editor, I'm currently toying
with the color scheme to see if you can highlight as many things as I can with
sublime text...

It would be great if it could, although it surely has well progressed over the
years.

I just noticed CSS is not highlighted inside a HTML file.

Sublime text has so many nice features that I got used to, it is going to be
hard to use something else.

------
abarry
My favorite plugin is "Save Actions" which will save a copy of the file you're
working on every minute with a different filename. It sounds silly until you
realize that you just blew away the last two hours of work with some "I'm sure
this is right" version control action.

And text is so small that I go clean out 500 MB of stuff every year or so.

~~~
conradfr
To be fair the local history function in Jetbains IDEs do that better / more
elegantly and can also restore deleted files or even entire folders.

------
sunstone
I use this for Django/Python development and it suits my work style very well.
It does the 20% of a full blown IDE's functions that provide 80% of the value.

Apparently it is based on the long line of editors starting with scite,
notepad++ and a bunch more.

~~~
rowyourboat
> It does the 20% of a full blown IDE's functions that provide 80% of the
> value.

Does it support code refactoring (renaming variables, classes, moving classes
or methods, ...)?

~~~
badsectoracula
No, but if you think that is part of the 80% of the value you might want to
rethink how you structure your code before writing it :-P.

~~~
rowyourboat
You kid, but seriously: Of course you will have to restructure your code as
the product evolves. Good refactoring support is not crucial for this, but
makes your life easier, and I found that by making my life easier, it lowers
the mental threshold for taking the plunge and restructuring that bit that
does not quite fit anymore.

Refactoring support is part of the 80% an IDE gives me over a good code
editor. I would consider code navigation, autocompletion and integrated
debugging to be the other crucial features of an IDE.

~~~
quickben
What do you usually do to have to refactor that much?

~~~
rowyourboat
All the time. I don't really understand how you don't. Requirements change
constantly, and the software's structure has to change with them, or become a
big ball of tangly interdependencies.

Refactoring is not a big deal. If you keep your code clean, each individual
refactoring is really quick - moving a method, renaming a trait to better fit
its new role, ... If you can do these kind of things with a minimum of
friction thanks to your IDE, you will do them, and you will not run into the
situation where you have accumulated loads of technical debt and need two
weeks to get everything into a maintainable state again.

~~~
badsectoracula
I'm not sure what to say beyond that i personally never felt the need for
this. One of the IDEs i use does have several refactoring features, but the
only one i ever used was the identifier rename and i probably used it around
2-3 times the last five years.

It is a useful feature when you need it, but personally it wouldn't affect my
choice of tools at all. After all i could just load an IDE that has it in the
rare case i need it and then continue using the other tool i prefer, it isn't
like modern computers can only run a single program at a time or anything :-P.

------
feikname
I usually use geany for my day to day development due to it being extremely
lightweight, highly recommend it.

The only thing it annoys me though is that the indentation detection heuristic
needs to be a bit better (i.e.
[https://github.com/geany/geany/issues/1008](https://github.com/geany/geany/issues/1008)).

------
joshbaptiste
No Vim bindings as explained by developers (not the goal of the core project)
and currently no Nim support
[https://www.geany.org/Main/AllFiletypes](https://www.geany.org/Main/AllFiletypes)

I will have to stick with VIM/VSCode for now, but holy cow this IDE is fast.

~~~
dom96
Doesn't Geany use Scintilla? Support for scintilla exists out there and in
fact I just found this PR which seems to have gotten stuck:
[https://github.com/geany/geany/pull/193](https://github.com/geany/geany/pull/193)

You can probably get syntax highlighting by copying the required file in the
right place.

------
oblib
I've been using Geany for a few years on my Raspberry Pi. Their "Raspbian OS"
includes it now.

I have it installed on my Mac too. I still mostly use BBEdit on it, but Geany
has some cool features that make it worth having on the Mac.

~~~
japhyr
Have you had any issues running it on a Mac? I've used it on Windows and
Linux, but I haven't owned a Mac until recently.

~~~
oblib
japhyr, I apologize for not replying sooner.

Geany runs very nice on my Mac. I have a older Mac Mini running El Capitan and
it's been solid on that.

------
thejeswi
Better Python autocompletion for Geany: [https://github.com/notetau/geany-
jedi-complete](https://github.com/notetau/geany-jedi-complete)

------
blauditore
Is Geany particularly strong with large files? I remember using it for a
particular reason once, and I think I was dealing with huge files, but don't
remember exactly.

~~~
kingosticks
Yes, up to a reasonable size. I use it for everything except monstrous files
(multiple gigabytes). A lot of similarly featured editors start to choke a
_lot_ sooner.

------
future31
During the years I have tested a lot of editors for programming. When running
on low-end tech sublime text is a very good option. Atom is to sluggish with a
very huge memory footprint. I used to program assembler on the Amiga where
every byte was sacred and highly valued. Today’s programmer don’t care much
about keeping there program lean, mean and compact. Though, it is very fun to
code with VSCode. For simple script coding vi and nano suffice.

------
fastball
Can we get the title changed?

Doesn't just run on Linux and Windows.

------
tdeck
This takes me back! I used Geany back in high school to write FreeBasic and
Python. Quite a nice editor and very approachable for beginners.

------
makapuf
Geany also has its place in my launch bar with a nice balance e between low
key IDE (class browser) and minimalism while feeling Linux native. I also use
vim and sublime but for small quick projects I like the comfort of this. One
thing I miss (maybe I didn't search enough) is multiple cursors though. I
can't live very long without it.

~~~
oneweekwonder
> I also use vim

Does geany have any vim key binding? Did a quick google and the first result
is a 200 line lua script dated 2013, so I'm not hopeful.

~~~
Sylos
I'm not terribly familiar with Geany, so don't take this as a confirmation
that it's not possible, but Kate, which is sort of KDE's Geany, does have vim
keybindings.

With Geany being a lightweight IDE, I'd say Kate is a feature-rich text
editor, so it's not quite the same, but maybe it works for you nonetheless.

------
rawoke083600
Been using it for at least the last 7 years as my daily editor/ide. Haven't
found a reason to switch yet.

~~~
dgivney
Yeah me too - I've tried many different IDEs but always find myself back in
Geany. Just an awesome tool.

------
bullen
I made this prototype [http://edit.rupy.se](http://edit.rupy.se), I'm looking
to find/build something that allows for productivity on a Raspberry Pi Zero.
Will try Geany, my fallback is Emacs.

------
indigodaddy
The headline says Linux and Windows, but looks like there is an OS X version
as well. Haven't used Geany since the 4-5 years I've been away from desktop
Linux/Windows, so that's good news, I'll be trying it out again!

------
kup0
I would probably use this all the time if it supported syntax highlighting in
mixed-language (HTML+CSS) files. I generally like it for my purposes, save
that one exception.

------
slurppurple
I remember always seeing this on the front page of the Ubuntu software centre,
never clicked on it though cause back then I strongly preferred simple code
editors to IDEs

------
MitjaBezensek
This brings back a lot of memories. We used to use Geany at the faculty where
I taught Introduction to programming.

------
georgehaake
Thoughts on Gnome Builder?

------
p53
There are a Rust-plugin for code-completion / racer?

------
oneweekwonder
eish seems portable apps is still on version 1.32. Will probably roll with a
update in the next week or so, then I will try it out.

~~~
opencl
It's not exactly a huge update:

Geany 1.33 (February 25, 2018)

    
    
        Bug fixes
        * Fix the symbols tree hierarchy when several tags have the same name
          (PR#1598).
    
        Interface
        * Add a tooltip showing the full path on menu items representing documents
          (PR#1706).
        * Add a note for applying the indent settings in the project preferences
          (PR#1650).
        * Enable popup menu on sidebar and message window notebooks (PR#1726).
        * Show status message on attempt to execute empty context action
          (Lars Paulsen, PR#1642).
        * GTK3 theming improvements and documentation (PR#1382).
    
        Filetypes
        * CSS: Update Grid properties (Issue#1705).
    
        Internationalization
        * Updated translations: de, el, es, fr, it, lv, pl, pt, tr, ru, zh_CN

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genericacct
Goes very well with raspberry and such!

------
waruqi
vscode + xmake

~~~
waruqi
[http://xmake.io](http://xmake.io)

------
Kenji
I installed Geany on Ubuntu about 4 years ago on my laptop. I opened a single
Java source file (or was it C++?). The fans instantly spun up, the machine was
under extreme load. My batteries drained like never before. I have never seen
anything like it, even full HD video streaming doesn't take this much battery.
I went back to Eclipse.

