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Sunday, May 22, 2011

Geany text edittor

I wanted to take a second to point out a great tool that some might otherwise have overlooked; <Geany>. Based on <(Wiki)Scintilla>, Geany is a light weight, cross-platform, text editor with a familiar layout. Once the packaged plugins are all enabled, Geany goes from, light weight, simple IDE, to system administration and configuration portal with out missing a beat.


Geany is a tabbed file editor with a familiar layout. A left column shows a tree based navigation panel. This doubles as a file browser, project file browser, and symbol list for the current file. A panel across the bottom can switch between compiler output, messages, and a terminal.

The IDE capabilities of Geany are pretty simple. It has most the text editing bells and whistles one is accustomed to, including code highlighting, text folding, and auto-completion. Aside from the integrated terminal, Geany can be configured to do simple make, build, and execute operations, although there doesn't seem to be any debugger integration.

When run with elevated privileges, Geany makes a handy GUI administration tool. Quick file navigation, tabbed file editing, and a terminal combine to make an efficient GUI administration tool. If your already running a GUI, you can be terminal warrior and still have the luxury of a GUI file editor.

Geany is a very light weight text editor released under the GNU General Public Licence. It's light weight GTK+ base makes it great for most window managers and platforms. Geany is a common project, included in most Linux repositories (like Ubuntu), that even has a Windows binary release available.

Geany is definitely a light weight, handy, and flexible tool that shouldn't be overlooked.