Geany is a lightweight IDE designed to have reduced loading times, with little dependency on external packages or libraries in Linux.
The new version of the IDE, Geany 2.0 has already been released and this release highlights various improvements to the user interface, such as improved support for dark themes, as well as improvements with symbols, bug fixes and more.
For those who do not know about Geany, you should know that This is a simple, but powerful integrated development environment. This IDE was developed with the aim of providing a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies on other packages. Another goal was to be as independent as possible from a special desktop environment like KDE or GNOME. Therefore, it uses only the GTK+ toolkit and only needs the GTK+ runtime libraries to run Geany.
The characteristics that stand out about Geany are:
- syntax highlighting
- code completion
- Automatic completion of frequently used constructs such as if, for, and while
- automatic completion of XML and HTML tags
- calling tips
- folding
- many supported file types such as C, Java, PHP, HTML, Python, Perl, Pascal
- symbol lists
- integrated terminal emulation
- extensibility through plugins
Main new features of Geany 2.0
In this new version of the IDE that is presented, experimental support stands out added to build system Meson, The biggest benefits mentioned are incredibly fast builds and easier-to-use setup.
In addition to this, in Geany 2.0 the support for AutoIt and GDScri markup filespt, as well as adding an interface to the code editor to view the change history (which is disabled by default).
Regarding the improvements in the user interface, it stands out that added a dialog to confirm operations when find and replace, as well as added support for filtering the content of the symbol tree and added a setting to show the end of lines whether the line ending characters are different from those selected by default.
On the other hand, the sSupport for Kotlin, Markdown, Nim, PHP and Python languages, The process of creating projects from directories in which the source codes are located has been simplified and settings for changing the size of the window title and tabs are provided.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- On Windows, the “Prof-Gnome” GTK theme is enabled by default (the option to enable the “Adwaita” theme is left as an option).
- Many parsers have been updated and synchronized with the Universal Ctags project.
- The sidebar offers a new tree view to view the list of documents.
- Updated versions of the Scintilla 5.3.7 and Lexilla 5.2.7 libraries.
- The requirements for the GTK library version have been increased; At least GTK 3.24 is now required to work.
- Session data and configuration are separate. The session related data is now in the session.conf file and the configurations are in geany.conf.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link
How to install Geany on Ubuntu and derivatives?
For those interested in being able to install this IDE on their system, they should know that they can find it within the repositories of their system and in the case of Ubuntu and derivatives it is no exception. To be able to install Geany in Ubuntu, just open a terminal and type the following command in it:
sudo apt install geany geany-plugins
Another method to install this IDE is with the help of the Flatpak packages and to do this it is enough to have the support installed in the system and type the following command in a terminal:
flatpak install flathub org.geany.Geany -y
And to run the IDE (if you didn't find the launcher) you just have to type the following command:
flatpak run org.geany.Geany