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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.

It has as modern a UI as your GTK theme has, so if you have Breeze-gtk it's not terrible.
I'm not sure what the starting comment meant, but there is more to UI than GTK theme, or any theme in general.

That being said, those who haven't tried Geany should most definitely give it a spin.

I read it as: the UI is as modern most other applications on your desktop (it uses whatever theme they do)
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)!
Would you mind please sharing your specs?
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.

I love VSCode, but only have that feeling "it flies" with Sublime Text.
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 :-)

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.
This brings back a lot of memories. We used to use Geany at the faculty where I taught Introduction to programming.
Been using it for at least the last 7 years as my daily editor/ide. Haven't found a reason to switch yet.
Yeah me too - I've tried many different IDEs but always find myself back in Geany. Just an awesome tool.
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.

> 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, ...)?

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.
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.

What do you usually do to have to refactor that much?
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.

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.

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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.

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

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.
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!!!

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

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

This is the IDE that I learned how to program with. So many fond memories. I like how the site is still up!
Yep, just had a huge nostalgia trip. I remember learning how to make GameMaker libraries using Pascal, C++ and Bloodshed's IDEs!
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!

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.
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.
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).

If anyone's interested I've got a geany-lua script repo here https://github.com/DGivney/geany-lua-scripts
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.
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.
> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.
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
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.

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 :)
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.
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.
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)
what’s your heavyweight?
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.
Have you tried IDEA?
That's like king of heavyweight IDEs
I haven't. Do you recommend?
All Jetbrains' IDEs are recommended
I like it a lot better than Eclipse, so yes, I think you should try it.
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!
... 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

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).