Geany is a great and light weight cross-platform integrated development environment for Linux and Unix based systems. It supports C, C++, Java, PHP, Python and 50+ other programming languages. Geany is known to run under Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, MacOS X, AIX v5.3, Solaris Express and Windows. Geany more closely resembles programming editors available for Microsoft Windows such as Notepad++. So if, you are switching from MS-Windows to Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora/Mint or BSD/OS X/Unix like platform try geany IDE.
Features
From the project home page:
Geany 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 GTK2 runtime libraries. Features of Geany:
- Syntax highlighting
- Code folding
- Symbol name auto-completion
- Construct completion/snippets
- Auto-closing of XML and HTML tags
- Call tips
- Symbol lists
- Code navigation
- Build system to compile and execute your code
- Simple project management
- Plugin interface
Install Geany Under Debian or Ubuntu Linux
Type the following command:
$ sudo apt-get install geany geany-common
Debian Linux user can install latest version using backports:
$ sudo apt-get -t squeeze-backports install geany geany-common
Install Geany Under CentOS / RHEL / Fedora Linux
First, turn on EPEL repo and type the following yum command to install geany:
# yum install geany
Sample outputs:
Loaded plugins: auto-update-debuginfo, protectbase, rhnplugin 0 packages excluded due to repository protections Setting up Install Process Resolving Dependencies --> Running transaction check ---> Package geany.x86_64 0:0.21-1.el6 will be installed --> Processing Dependency: vte for package: geany-0.21-1.el6.x86_64 --> Running transaction check ---> Package vte.x86_64 0:0.25.1-7.el6 will be installed --> Finished Dependency Resolution Dependencies Resolved ====================================================================================================== Package Arch Version Repository Size ====================================================================================================== Installing: geany x86_64 0.21-1.el6 epel 2.8 M Installing for dependencies: vte x86_64 0.25.1-7.el6 rhel-x86_64-server-6 354 k Transaction Summary ====================================================================================================== Install 2 Package(s) Total download size: 3.1 M Installed size: 11 M Is this ok [y/N]:
Install geany under FreeBSD
To install the geany via port, enter:
# cd /usr/ports/devel/geany/
# make install clean
## plugins ##
# cd /usr/ports/devel/geany-plugin-addons/
# make install clean
To add the binary geany package, enter
# pkg_add -r geany
## plugins
# pkg_add -r geany-plugin-addons
Install geany under OpenBSD
Type the following command:
# export PKG_PATH=http://mirror.esc7.net/pub/OpenBSD/`uname -r`/packages/`machine -a`/
# pkg_add -v -i geany
Install geany under Linux / Unix using source code
Geany is available through the official Debian / Ubuntu and other archives. However, you will get older stable version. To install the latest version type the following commands:
$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://download.geany.org/geany-1.22.tar.gz
$ wget http://download.geany.org/geany-1.22.tar.gz.sig
$ wget http://download.geany.org/colombanw-pubkey.txt
$ gpg --import
Untar the tar ball, enter:
$ tar xvf geany-1.22.tar.gz
Compile geany, enter:
$ cd geany-1.22/
$ ./configure
$ make
Install geany, enter:
$ sudo make install
Start geany, enter:
$ /usr/local/bin/geany
How do I start geany?
Simply type the following command:
$ geany
Or, choose in your application menu of your used Desktop Environment:
Applications > Development / Programming > Geany
Sample outputs:
Fig.01: Geany in action
Fig.02: Geany IDE: hello.c - build and executed program
Geany plugins
Geany has a feature rich plug-ins. By default, it will install a few plug-ins in your system. To see current plug-ins, visit:
Tools > Plugins Manager
Sample outputs:
Fig.03: Geany IDE Plugins
$ apt-cache search geany-pluginSample outputs:
geany-plugin-addons - miscellanous plugins for Geany geany-plugin-doc - a documentation plugin for Geany geany-plugin-gdb - GDB plugin for Geany geany-plugin-latex - improved LaTeX support plugin for Geany geany-plugin-lipsum - Lorem Ipsum generator plugin for Geany geany-plugin-lua - Lua scripting plugin for Geany geany-plugin-prj - an alternative project manager for Geany geany-plugin-sendmail - mailer plugin for Geany geany-plugin-shiftcolumn - text column shifting plugin for Geany geany-plugin-spellcheck - spellcheck plugin for Geany geany-plugin-vc - VCS plugin for Geany geany-plugins-common - set of plugins for Geany (translations) geany-plugins - set of plugins for Geany geany-plugin-codenav - code navigation plugin for Geany geany-plugin-debugger - debugger plugin for Geany geany-plugin-extrasel - extra selection plugin for Geany geany-plugin-gendoc - documentation generation plugin for Geany geany-plugin-gproject - gproject plugin for Geany geany-plugin-insertnum - number inserting plugin for Geany geany-plugin-macro - macro plugin for Geany geany-plugin-numberedbookmarks - numbered bookmarks plugin for Geany geany-plugin-pg - pg plugin for Geany geany-plugin-prettyprinter - XML pretty printer for Geany geany-plugin-tableconvert - table convert plugin for Geany geany-plugin-treebrowser - tree browser plugin for Geany geany-plugin-updatechecker - update checker plugin for Geany geany-plugin-webhelper - web helper plugin for Geany geany-plugin-xmlsnippets - XMLSnippets plugin for Geany
To install VCS plugin for Geany, enter:
$ sudo apt-get install geany-plugin-vc
Editor features
Geany offers various editor features such as:
- Auto save.
- Auto backup.
- Autocompletion.
- Word part completion.
- Auto close quotes and brackets.
- Code indentation.
- Scope autocompletion.
- Snippet keybindings and much more.
Visit Edit > Preferences:
-
- Editor features
-
- Code indentation settings
-
- Code completions settings
-
- Editor display settings
But wait, there's more!
Geany has a dedicated third-party plug-ins repository at plugins.geany.org. What you will find here is a lot of plugin stuff for Geany. There is a Geany Plugins project containing a lot of plugins, which is developed by various developers on GitHub.
Conclusion
I liked geany because of its speed and small size. You do not need to install entire KDE or Gnome desktop or Java bloat to use GUI based IDE. It lets me compile and execute / debug code without having to open another terminal. Visit the following resources for more information:
- geany home page - Download geany and/or read the documentation.
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I used and loved geany for a long time. If you’re looking for a leg-up on gedit or pluma, this is a must-have. Its the plugins that make it great.
I used geany mostly for PHP, javascript, HTML, CSS, R, and bash, -mostly because it is SO MUCH FASTER than java-driven IDE’s like netbeans and eclipse. But I swear by Sublime Text 2 now. I’ll probably never go back to geany.
My biggest qualm with geany as a simple editor (unlike gedit) was that I couldn’t open files on mounted filesystems. Not a huge deal, but it sure gets annoying real fast when you want to. (I still use gedit for that. Or vi)
I wanted to try it, but after I read it resembles microsux notepad, I leave it. It means ‘Linux’ writer is not GNU guy at all.
Geany does not resembles notepad in any other thing that both can edit text, geany is a powerful editor with very interesting features, (you can write addons in lua), has syntax highlighting for tons of languages and lots of plugins.
Under Archlinux:
pacman -S geany geany-plugins
Minor error: sudo apt-get geany geany-common should be sudo apt-get install geany geany-common
Thanks for the heads up :)
My favorite editor, Geany have column mode like UltraEdit and others greats features
I’m install geany in kde (linuxmint 13 kde) and geany doesn’t work as usual. Geany builds and compiles with g++, but it cannot run the file. What I see is a blank console screen every time I ran a cxx file.
Geany commands:
compile : g++ -Wall -c “%f”
build : g++ -Wall -o “%e” “%f”
excute : “./%e”
How fix it?
Geany is really a good tool for those reluctant to Eclipse mess… And it’s really a multi-platform solution as it also works under windows. A little annoying bug for the latter is when you use it with multi-desktop windows add-ons: Window is not refreshed properly after switching desktop back.
In fact, the only reason I can’t use it more is it’s not able to sftp (or sshfs) on a remote system: Most of the times, ssh server is present on team build hosts in corporate environments with conf management/sources to log-in/remote X for development… but no NFS mounts for security reasons.
And even if present on build host, geany is already too X ressource hungry for full remote use: Only nedit or emacs console version will make the job. Geany must run on user host and be able to use remote files in the currently most standard way: SSH.
when start geany getting this error geany
Geany: cannot open display