Geany - The Flyweight IDE, for fast development

From a developer point of view - having a functional IDE is a must. Most of the IDEs are full of features but slow and this is when and why Geany comes up: to offer a lightweight alternative to the existing IDEs.

Geany IDE is a powerful, stable and lightweight source code and text editor IDE for programmers that provides tons of useful features without bogging down your workflow. It is designed to have short load times, with limited dependency on separate packages or external libraries. The first experiences with this IDE after a long time with other tools such Eclipse or NetBeans looks interesting at a first glance. Some features are missing, but there are other valuable features that can't be found in other IDEs - by example: matching brackets or quotes among different blocks of texts. By example, having a part of HTML code in a Javascript string and other part of HTML in other JS string ... well, it does the match of brackets or quotes among the different strings which not too many code editors can.

It also provides support for detecting and converting character sets. So you can open and save files in different character sets, and even convert a file from one character set to another. Only text files are supported, i.e. opening files which contain NULL-bytes may fail. This IDE will try to open the file anyway but it is likely that the file will be truncated because it can only be read up to the first occurrence of a NULL-byte. All characters after this position are lost and are not written when you save the file.

Another interesting feature of geany is that it can parse very fast large code files. While NetBeans or Eclipse will stale for a minute or so parsing such large code files, it does it on-the-fly, ... really fast which is an advantage in many situations where have to deal with large code projects. This is perhaps because Eclipse and NetBeans are written in Java (virtual-machine) while this software is written in C - very fast and light.

This IDE tries to detect the encoding of a file while opening it, but auto-detecting the encoding of a file is not easy and sometimes an encoding might not be detected correctly. In this case you have to set the encoding of the file manually in order to display it correctly. You can this in the file open dialog by selecting an encoding in the drop down box or by reloading the file with the file menu item "Reload as". The auto-detection works well for most encodings but there are also some encodings where it is known that auto-detection has problems.

Some other "best" features that this IDE offers are: better parsing of ES6 Javascript symbols in the IDE comparing with most of the IDEs, support for many languages - includding a very good support for GO, Rust and Vala programming languages.

There is a special encoding "None" which uses no encoding. It is useful when you know that it cannot auto-detect the encoding of a file and it is not displayed correctly. It detects the Unicode Byte Order Mark - the Byte Order Mark helps to detect the encoding of a file, e.g. whether it is UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE and so on.