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Geany

The Fly-Weight IDE.

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Overview

Geany is a lightweight, GTK-based text editor and integrated development environment (IDE). It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. It is designed to be simple and fast, making it suitable for systems with limited resources. It supports many filetypes and has some nice features, but it is not meant to be as powerful as larger IDEs like Eclipse or IntelliJ.

✨ Key Features

  • Syntax highlighting
  • Code folding
  • Symbol list and code navigation
  • Auto-completion of symbols/words
  • Simple project management
  • Built-in terminal emulator
  • Extensible via plugins

🎯 Key Differentiators

  • Extremely fast and lightweight
  • Cross-platform (stronger on Linux than Notepad++)
  • Provides basic IDE features in a text editor's footprint
  • Minimal dependencies

Unique Value: Delivers a balance of essential IDE features and extreme performance, making it a perfect 'fly-weight' IDE for quick coding tasks and resource-limited environments.

🎯 Use Cases (4)

Lightweight programming and scripting Running on older hardware or resource-constrained systems (like Raspberry Pi) Users who want a simple IDE without the overhead of larger applications C and C++ development with GTK

✅ Best For

  • Writing and compiling C/C++ programs
  • Python scripting
  • Quickly editing code files

💡 Check With Vendor

Verify these considerations match your specific requirements:

  • Large, complex enterprise projects
  • Users who need advanced debugging, refactoring, and code analysis tools
  • Web developers looking for deep JavaScript framework integration

🏆 Alternatives

Notepad++ Code::Blocks Visual Studio Code

More feature-rich than a basic text editor, but significantly lighter and faster than VS Code or full Java IDEs.

💻 Platforms

Desktop (Linux, Windows, macOS)

✅ Offline Mode Available

🔌 Integrations

Git (via plugin) Various build systems (Make, etc.)

💰 Pricing

Contact for pricing
Free Tier Available

Free tier: Completely free and open-source.

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