Ok, this is going to be controversial . . .

Today I found Geany . . . and my search for the perfect Linux text-editor finally ended. If you’re already a VIM or Emacs ninja then you may want to stop reading now, if however you come from a Windows background (like me) or you like the niceties a true GUI tool can offer, then Geany may be everything you’ve been looking for.

I use Python, so whitespace management is *very* important to me, for this I need some key functionality:

• Whitespace display
• Correct tab/space handling

On Windows my editor of choice was Notepad++, it did all of above superbly. When I moved to Linux most of my development-related tasks became much easier, however I sorely missed some of the key editing  features that I had become used to (as a side note – I also miss the GUI repo browsing offered by the TortoiseHG).

Why I love Geany

It’s fast, lightweight and has some killer features . . .

1. Whitespace

Geany shows whitespace clearly.  It handles tabs and spaces properly without interchanging the two. These features make all Python indentation issues just drift away.

2. Folding

It’s great to be able to collapse all the classes and functions that you’re not working on to save some screen real-estate (not to mention the scrolling up/down).

3. Class/Function browser

This sealed the deal. The browser on the left pane lists all the classes, functions, variables and imports found in the open file. This makes navigation very quick, and is a boon for working your way around an unfamiliar piece of code.

3. Other great stuff

And there’s more: Built-in file browser, shell, scratchpad, and support for 3rd-party plugins are just some of the other great features that Geany has to offer. As a bonus, Geany can also run on Windows too.

So Geany it is, and I’m finally happy. Here are some of the other editors I tried (and why they didn’t quite fit the bill for me).

Gedit
The default editor in Ubuntu is actually a really nice little tool and does 99% of what I need, but something I cannot live without is whitespace display. None of the available Gedit plugins seem to offer this..

VIM
Immensely powerful, but has a learning curve that right now I’m just to busy for.

Emacs
See VIM.

Wing IDE
I had high hope for Wing, but it let me down massively when it started to mix up tabs and spaces within the same indented sections.

Eclipse
I really don’t want to wait 10mins for Eclipse to load every day. It’s far too big for my needs.

I’m off to Prague tomorrow ahead of next week’s EuroDjangoCon.

In a great demonstration of crowdsourcing, jacobian has created a Google Map for Prague which is now being populated by conference goers.

View EuroDjangoCon in a larger map

So far it includes the conference hotel, tram stops and a bunch of bars, restaurants and sites. Who needs a guidebook!

EuroDjangoCon has been organized by Robert Lofthouse and takes place in Prague on 4th-6th of May 2009 (with development sprints on the 7th and 8th).

I’m looking forward to meeting up with fellow Django folks so please stop me and say Hi if you see me wandering around.

Things are moving fast at here Aware Monitoring HQ as we continue the development of our new web infrastructure monitoring service. One area that has come on leaps and bounds over the past few weeks is our branding. My co-founder Nick Barker blogged about our the importance of our logo, business cards and holding page some time ago, and now they have all come together . . .

Our first step: the logo. ..

I think we nailed it . . . well, actually our graphic designer did (with a little help and guidance from us of course!).  

Our logo is the foundation for all of our branding. It’s a strong image that stay’s recognizable in single/reverse colour and has an identity that we can build on. The ‘bars’ image reinforces the monitoring theme.

Next up: business cards . . .

Our business card design builds on the logo theme and extends it even further. On the front of the card we have subtle grey bars, and on the reverse we have a striking blue theme with a large logo image. 

Nick and I spent some time discussing the advantages and disadvantages of using the back of the business card (versus leaving it plain white). After seeing the initial design concepts the decision became a no-brainer – we loved the image, and it’s a great addition to our branding. As Nick said: “It’s a walking advertisement”.

The holding page . . .

With our logo and business cards in place we moved on to our holding page. With lots of work still to do on our web-app we wanted to make sure we had something in place to point people to and capture their interest. Back to our trusted designer we went, and again he came through.

Instantly recognizable if you’ve been given one of our business cards, the holding page continues the blue theme to create a bold and striking image. Our holding page will be around for a while so we wanted to get it right in order to make a great first impression.

Seeing all of our branding come together has started to make everything seem more real. It’s no longer just an idea, it’s something I can actually see, hold, and touch.