In the search for a nice IDE that covers multi languages I have always ended up back at using gedit. It has always just stuck because its simple, clean, fast, and low on dependencies. Over the past few months with me doing more than normal amounts of coding at work, I started to want some of the extra features I have felt it was missing.
Enter geany..
On first look at geany you can tell that this thing is made to be light weight, but still has a little more going on that I like in most cases. It looks like a lighter version of most IDEs I have tried. Your main coding window is on the right side and includes line numbers which are always handy and supports multiple open files via tabs (even my toaster has tabs now). It is important to note that you can drag the tabs around and reorder them on the fly.
To the left of the tabs is the “symbols tab”, which right now some people might wonder what that is and I will cover later. Next to the symbols tab in the same frame we have the pages tab… This seems pretty redundant with the other tabs to the right, unless you have a mass of tabs open and want a quicker way to get around. At the bottom of all this we have some other standard IDE type options. Of these I tend to only use the terminal (yep its a terminal), and the scribble pad. The scribble pad allows you to take down quick notes and is not project or page specific. It will also save this on exit and reopen of the IDE. I did some digging around and it just stores this in the config file for geany (~/.geany/geany.conf).
Geany supports a large amount of file types and provides syntax highlighting for each. This is handy if you happen to work in more than one language but don’t want to have to change IDEs depending on what you are working on.
The main reason I tried out geany in the first place was the support of code folding.
As you can see above the code folding works as expected and really helps clean up some messy complex code.
Another interesting little feature to geany is the ability to add what I call “markers” to your work (I didn’t look what they call them). If you click to the right of a line number it will mark that line. This is handy for working in long files. I use to just put comments in my code for this and still would if I plan to come back to it later. For quick changes this comes in handy and will let you jump around the page quicker. It will not save these when you close the file.
Now what about that little symbols window I almost closed to get out of my way when I started this thing up… It actually turns out to come in useful after all. :) It can be used to locate variables, functions, classes, and more in a page quick. Click what you want and it will jump to that section of the page. If that section is folded it will unfold the needed section for you.
These are just some highlights that I found while playing around with geany, and is by no means everything great about it. It supports a fair amount of auto completion that in most cases would bother me, but has not the past few days of using it. In all geany is a nice IDE with a light feel, and tends to stay out of your way when you are working, but brings some quick little tools to your finger tips.
