Geany
Geany is a powerful, stable and lightweight programmer's text editor that provides tons of useful features without bogging down your workflow.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source (GPL-2.0)
Application types
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- BSD
- Snapcraft
- Flathub
- PortableApps.com
- Flatpak
- Haiku
Features
Properties
- Lightweight
- Support for Themes
- Minimalistic
- Customizable
- Distraction-free
- Privacy focused
Features
- Multiplatform
- Code navigation
- Syntax Highlighting
- Shell integration
- Automatic Indentation
- Debian package compatible
- Extensible by Plugins/Extensions
- Ad-free
Support for LaTeX
- Dark Mode
- Live Preview
- Autocompletion
- Batch Editing
- Works Offline
- Full-Text Search
- Support for scripting
- Support for MarkDown
- Portable
- Hierarchical Structure
Git Support
- Code Formatting
- Spell Checking
- Shortcut keys
- Built-in terminal emulation
- Support for Large File
Tags
Geany News & Activities
Recent News
- POX published news article about Geany
Geany 2.1 brings more built-in themes, Messages & Compiler output search, and much moreGeany 2.1, the latest version of this free and open source code editor, brings a suite of workflow ...
- POX published news article about Geany
Code editor Geany celebrates 18th anniversary with release of version 2.0Geany, the robust and lightweight programmer's text editor, recently celebrated its 18th birthday a...
Recent activities
- theEpicEgg56 liked Geany
- Ugotsta added Geany as alternative to Fresh editor
- paranoiddownloader liked Geany
nabbisen added Geany as alternative to Google Antigravity- Alaik updated Geany
- holakoyad liked Geany
Featured in Lists
My favorite web development tools - Web languages - Nocode - Marketing - Code Editors - HTML/CSS Frameworks - CSS …
A list with 809 apps by AmileyaRyver without a description.
A list with 53 apps by fgernet without a description.
What is Geany?
Geany is a powerful, stable and lightweight programmer's text editor that provides tons of useful features without bogging down your workflow. It runs on Linux, Windows and macOS is translated into over 40 languages, and has built-in support for more than 50 programming languages.
Fast & Small
One the primary reasons for Geany's existence is that there is a need for a decent, GUI, lightweight, cross-platform, flexible and powerful IDE/editor. Many editors meet one or more of these requirements but fall short on others.
Geany attempts to hit the sweet spot.
Great Community
Geany is Good Ol' Fashioned Free Software. Using the GPL v2 license, Geany assures that not only can you customize and hack it, but that everyone benefits from changes the community makes. Geany has a vibrant community of professionals and hobbyists alike that contribute improvements and fixes across numerous platforms including The Mailing Lists, Github, Matrix #geany:matrix.org, Mastodon and Twitter.
Easily Customizable
Many parts of Geany are heavily customizable like color themes (Geany Themes) or adding new filetypes. Furthermore, Geany provides many settings to let you adjust it to your needs and preferences.
Many Filetypes
Many supported filetypes including popular programming languages like C, Java, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, Python or Perl. But Geany also includes support for other useful filetypes like ini-style config files, Diff output, SQL files and many more.
Many Plugins
With Geany's plugin system, users can get more features into Geany and developers can easily add new features and/or improve existing ones.












Comments and Reviews
It is very powerful yet simple to use and lightweight. Also there are a lot of plugin that can be written in Python or Lua. You can change compilation commands easily and understand easily what it's doing, unlikely Eclipse. All the main languages as well supported. It's a great alternative to sublime and Notepad++, the only reason it's not very known is that thery're not good on marketing (look at the old school site), and users don't talk about it very much. Unlike other editor it's immediately simple to use but still powerful. Shortcut are well done, powerful and familiar so you can do things like multiline cursor and moving up and down rows of text (which is very useful). Unlike editor like atom or Visual Studio Code it's blazing fast on startup. It is actively developed from many years and it's probably here to stay for many years.
barely usable from the get go as it does not allow you to change interface languages from your system's default to English
Geany does allow you to set the UI language manually ( https://www.geany.org/documentation/faq/#how-can-i-change-the-language-of-the-user-interface ). But it is not user-friendly in my opinion. It uses the environment variable LANGUAGE at launch. So a custom value can be set in a shortcut or on the command line. In my opinion, it should be made to be configurable in settings.
Nice and lightweight (50mb downloaded on Windows, compared to 15mb for Notepad++). Just as fast and responsive as Notepad++.
The appearance is probably more customizable in Geany, but it's GTK.
Either one of these apps should give you what you need.
An alternative is Kate, but it's like 500mb. Still fast though, and it not only has tabbed, but windowed screens, which is useful (though most people probably would rather their window managers take charge of that outside of Windows).
Another alternative is VIM, if you're willing to learn all the key bindings. There is also a gui version of VIM.
You should definitely try it on Windows too and compare with other similar applications like Notepad++.
My go to for coding nowadays. I'm still learning vim, I like integrating everything together without it building up in large sizes. It's fun. So basically what I'm trying to say, is that this application called Geany is very close to Notepad++. It's basically Notepad++ but more stable (if you know you know) with unfortunately less of a community for plugins in comparison to notepad++. That being said, there's always room open out there for more contribution to cool little nifty plugins. Though, the current plugins that you can find on the official documentation wiki for Geany itself are pretty essential kind of plugins alone. So yeah, have fun. This thing gets the job done like I want it to. I actually used to be quite skeptical of it back then, and by back then I mean 1-2 years ago. Software is cool.
Probably the best open source GUI code editor / IDE. It's simple to configure, you can customize the UI and color scheme, and add plugins. It has autocompletion, syntax highlighting, etc. It's lightweight and fast, and it fits my needs perfectly.
An excellent cross-platform text editor with syntax highlighting support for code editing. If you are looking for something similar to Notepad++ for platforms other than Windows, this is probably the app you want. My only complaint is that it is not as lightweight on Windows as Notepad++, probably due to its dependency on Gtk+ libraries. Its configurations settings are also easier to navigate in my opinion.