Geany: The Linux text editor for ex-Windows users

September 4th, 2009 — Dev

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.
Geany Whitespace

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).
Geany Folding

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.
Geany Symbols

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.

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