Every developer who spends hours in front of a computer screen writing codes, absolutely needs an editor to program. Whether we want to program a web page, an application or a program, we must use a tool that allows us to edit the code, modify it and work with it.
Geany is a powerful, stable, and lightweight code editor with certain basic features of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It is an open source cross platform editor that is designed specifically for programmers thanks to its built-in support for over 50 programming languages. In addition, with Geany you can perform functions such as syntax highlighting and autocompletion.
Now that a new version has been announced, let’s see what has changed in Geany.
Geany 1.38 Highlights
The most important thing to note is that Geany 1.38 removed the GTK2 support. Dropping the GTK2-specific code while keeping in the code relevant to GTK3 support lightened the Geany codebase. As a result, opening documents, especially on startup, is now faster than ever.
On the UI side, Geany 1.38 comes with added keybinding to reload all open documents. This is a very useful feature, so you no longer need to individually reload every open file after an automated tool changes all of them.
Moreover the new version also brings support for two new file types – Julia and Meson. Just for information, Julia is a high-level, high-performance, dynamic programming language. Meson is a widely used open source build system.
Note that starting with this release, the Windows binaries are built against GTK3 and for the x86_64 (amd64) platform. 32bit Windows systems are no longer supported.
For more information about all changes in the new version, you can refer to the Geany 1.38 release notes or you can visit the project’s website.
How to install Geany on Linux
Geany is available in the package archives of many Linux ditros.
On Ubuntu or any other Debian-based system, type the following command:
sudo apt install geany
In order to install Geany on Fedora type:
sudo dns install geany
Arch Linux users can install the Geany package from the Arch’s official repo:
sudo pacman -S geany
You can also use the software center of your particular Linux distro to install Geany.