After over a year and a half in development since its last v2.0, Geary, a lightweight, fast, and easy-to-use Integrated Development Environment designed to provide basic IDE features with minimal dependencies, has reached version 2.1.
It now ships with the full geany-themes collection, eliminating the extra step of hunting down stylish color schemes. Moreover, the editor finally adopts platform-native file selection dialogs, addressing one of the most common user requests and enabling smooth drag-and-drop functionality between Geany and the host desktop.
Usability got several other touch-ups:
- Search everywhere – Messages and compiler output panes are now searchable, making it easier to trace elusive warnings.
- Filtered views – New filters in the “Open Documents” sidebar and “Keybindings” settings keep sprawling lists under control.
- Smarter confirmations – A new preference allows users to skip the “replace in session” prompt, while another makes wrap-around searches less cumbersome.
Small visual tweaks—think cleaned-up preference tabs and consistent encoding lists—further streamline the interface.
Behind the scenes, the team squashed a set of long-standing corner cases. Geany will no longer silently truncate files that contain NUL bytes, nor will it misdetect encodings on tricky documents. Session handling, CPU spikes after builds, and even the occasional misfired document-activate signal have all been addressed.
Under the hood, Geany’s editing core now rides on Scintilla 5.5.4 and its partner library Lexilla 5.4.2. Aside from general performance gains, these updates unlock multi-caret paste and autocompletion, a boon for anyone wrangling repetitive code edits.
Additionally, there is support for 14 new syntaxes, including CIL, Dart, Dockerfile, LESS/SCSS, Nix, Prolog, Raku, SystemVerilog, Terraform, TOML, and Zig, as well as parser updates powered by Universal Ctags p6.1.20240519.0.
For Windows users, the installer is now cryptographically signed via SignPath.io. The default monospaced font has been switched to Consolas, and the title bar has adopted the host theme. Smaller toolbar icons and improved Meson support round out the platform-specific perks.
For more information, see the release notes.
Source tarballs and platform-specific installers are already live on Geany’s download mirrors. As usual, most rolling distributions should pick up the release within days, while others will follow according to their packaging cadence.
