Comments on: Geany: The Linux text editor for ex-Windows users

By: Thrawn

Thrawn — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 06:29:32 +0000

@Carles: The Document menu has ‘Fold All’ and ‘Unfold All’, and you can assign them to hotkeys. You can also Shift+click on any fold point to recursively fold/unfold all of its children, instead of the default behavior of remembering each child’s fold state, so you can quickly expand whichever segment you’re working on.

I’m actually not convinced about the value of vi(m). I can get by with it, but it seems to me that using it effectively would involve a whole lot of counting; navigation is based on knowing exactly how many characters/words/lines you want to traverse. Surely the mouse is faster than that? Mice aren’t evil, they’re just a different (and more recent) input paradigm, with very different strengths and weaknesses.

By: Thrawn

Thrawn — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 04:33:35 +0000

Same experience here with loving Notepad++, trying WINE, and then finding Geany! They’re actually cousins; both use the Scintilla editing component, which would be why they feel similar.

You can run Geany on Windows, but apparently it’s not quite as good as on Linux, because GTK isn’t really designed for Windows.

Don’t forget to look up the Tree Browser plugin .

By: Carles

Carles — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 21:52:19 +0000

Feature 2.Folding – Is there a shortcut to fold all the classes and functions in one go or for Geany to remember which ones I had opened or close from last session. I hate having to click all the ones I’m not working every time I open Geany. thank you

By: Simon Oxley

Simon Oxley — Thu, 20 May 2010 08:35:01 +0000

Thanks for your comments David, I didn’t know about the Draw Spaces plugin. I’ll definitely check it out.

By: David

David — Tue, 18 May 2010 12:57:05 +0000

Gedit is *this* close to being the holy grail of editors in Linux, only to disappoint you with some really annoying quirk.

Gedit has the Draw Spaces plugin. It works quite well, but customizing the colors is a bit of a pain (there’s a blog on that topic here: http://www.codeistry.com/blog/2009/05/choosing-syntax-highlighting-colours-for-the-draw-spaces-gedit-plugin/).

For me the killer is that there’s no working plugin to setup tab/spaces rules on a per-file-type basis though. I like my HTML and CSS files to use tabs and my Python files to use spaces. You could use modelines, but meh…

So, VIM is it for now

By: Simon Oxley

Simon Oxley — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:33:14 +0000

@Jon – ha! I tried the WINE route too. I think you’ll get on ok with Geany, it feels very familiar after Notepad++.

You must let me know if you uncover any juicy Geany features or find any useful plugins.

By: Jon Winstanley

Jon Winstanley — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:52:49 +0000

Hi Simon, that editor looks great. I have struggled for a while using Notepad++ through WINE but this looks excellent. Thanks for the tip.