Geany: A better IDE
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.
July 23rd, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Cool, that does look nice while still being simple. I’ve been using eclipse for the past year and a bit now and those are all the features I can’t live without anymore (code folding, code outline, code completion). Auto completing code templates are also super handy, along with integrated content versioning (subversion in the case of what I’ve been working on lately). And a must for myself is some type of vim integration for the editor.
Also if your working with python code, Pida (http://pida.co.uk/) is a great lightweight IDE worth giving a try.
July 24th, 2007 at 12:09 am
eclipse seems to have way to much going on for me. Mind you most of my work is still all php with the odd python. My python usage is glorified console scripting, and is used cause of all the modules avail to it.
I might have to give pida a try since I am pretty sure I have not yet. I just got a huge book on Javascript.. As much as I hate Javascript it is starting to become something you can’t really live with out in all cases.. Or so I am told. :)
July 24th, 2007 at 4:47 am
Ooooh, neat! I’m definitely going to have to give that a try next chance I get! Some of those features look like they could be very useful, indeed. As much as I love gedit, I think code folding could make me switch, providing there are no other negative side effects.
Also, nice new theme! The abundance of whitespace is relieving after spending a few hours cluttered up in multiple windows and ads and the like.
July 24th, 2007 at 9:28 am
epibeta: Have not found any side effects yet from the code folding.
The theme is more just clean up of some stuff and a new graphic for the header, not a very drastic a change.. But it seems to have made a more than expected change to the over all look of the site.
July 31st, 2007 at 2:47 am
Okay, I finally tried this thing out! Just for fun, I thought it might be neat to make a list of the first 20 things about Geany that leave any kind of impression on me. Some of these are the same things you pointed out, some are a bit different… I put an emoticon next to each one - a smiley :) if it left a positive impression, a frowney face :( if it left a negative impression and a confused emoticon :S if something confused me or if I just didn’t know if whether something was quite positive or negative.
Here we go:
1. Very fast to load! :)
2. No saving colours in gcolor2 module :(
3. Hitting that big fat close button closes my document :S
4. Markers look VERY promising :)
5. Search on the toolbar should be convenient :)
6. Whoa, this thing has built-in templates!!! KICKASS!!! :)
7. What the hell are these yellow arrows again? :S
8. Ooooooh code folding… *drool* :)
9. Not sure why you’d need that Open Files tab when each document already has it’s own tab. :S
10. Little green line for marking row length looks like a good idea! :)
11. Scribbles on the scribble pad get saved when you restart… neat-o! :)
12. The built-in terminal will be a god-send for small tasks like changing permissions on a file. :)
13. You can change line break type and convert tabs to spaces :)
14. Ooh, you can make whitespace and line endings visible… excellent! :)
15. Keycommands for indent/unindent works just like gedit :)
16. Just found out you can customize the templates! Yes! :)
17. Word count feature - good to have :)
18. Whoa, zoom in and out - interesting :S
19. Reopens all your documents when you restart :)
20. It keeps a log of files that are opened and closed :)
My Emotional Index:
:) = 15 (or 75%)
:( = 1 (or 5%)
:S = 4 (or 20%)
By the looks of things, I think I’m going to like Geany, as soon as I get used to a few minor confusing points! Good find, hurt!
July 31st, 2007 at 6:22 pm
You could always use the scribble pad to save colors I guess.. not as nice as it being built into the color tool though..
Yellow arrows are showing where anything selected on the left is in the document.
Tab window is handy if you have more tabs that the size of the window i guess…
Zooming is handy for changing font sizes to locate stuff quicker or see a section of code that is larger than the screen in one go.
August 1st, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Whoa! I hadn’t noticed that you can use standard key commands for zooming… that is kinda handy! :)