Geany and other Development Tools

Proving the Obviously Untrue

Geany and other Development Tools Sat, Apr 26. 2008

programming
I've tried lots of programming editors and ides over the years, obviously in Unix and Linux this is a Holy War, particularly between the advocates of vi and emacs. It is common for both groups to suggest that the other editor is hopelessly over-complex or clumsy. I think there's some truth in that, because essentially, they both stink.

I tend to be an emacsen user myself, but I just think emacs is slightly less awful than vi. My first action on a new install is usually to use vi to edit my sources.list in Debian, to help me install emacs. Perhaps thats strange, because I really like sed. So what's the problem with them? They both share this kind of puritanically awkward interface that works well on a console, but sucks in a GUI. They both use ridiculously arcane sequences of key presses to do anything, and I mean even basic stuff like saving and quitting. Yes, yes, you don't have to lecture me about old terminals and their limitations, been there done that, got the t-shirt. I tend to do all my systems maintenance in emacs, but when I'm programming, I've started to love the softness of a decent editor that actually makes it plain and simple to edit multiple buffers of source code, even though its a pain to use different editors for console and gui work.
I can't bring myself to love gedit, it's just a bit clunky, and I've generally used Kate for lots of PHP. It's quite nice, but it's a KDE graft in my otherwise Gnome world, and that causes a few minor annoyances, plus, at least on Debian Kate still doesn't seem to support a PHP symbol browser.

So, I just tried Geany for a few days. I really like it, it's simple, fast, lean, has some nice features like showing a feint line at an indentation level, working PHP symbol browsing (the compile function even runs php -l) on the file to check for syntax errors, simple but neat. I nice VC plugin allows easy diffs, but the VC integration could be nicer. All in all, I think I'll play with it for some more time, but one thing it does annoys me. When I save a PHP file with no new line after the closing characters, it adds one automatically. Bah, I don't like that, I'd do it if I wanted it. Oh, by the way, I also use PySVN Workbench for casual subversion jobs, it's nice, clear and makes it easy to avoid silly mistakes. I still tend to use the command line for more complex stuff though.
Posted by Colin Turner in programming, review Comments: (2) Trackbacks: (0)
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#1 - JoHo said:
2008-05-14 20:13 - (Reply)

I too am an Emacs user, but some IDE:s are nice. Granted, most of them are quite bloated by the time they reach a decent level of features. One thing that Geany lacks, IMHO, is remote FTP/SFTP/SSH/etc. Sure, you can do mounting of remote file systems in a number of different ways, some more suitable than direct SFTP/SSH, but if you need a multi-platform editor (Windows/Linux), it's very convenient to have built-in "remote file" support. ZDE is quite nice -- but doesn't go all the way. Active State's Komodo IDE is also nice, but it too takes some getting used to. When/if Geany ever implements some sort of remote file support, I'll have a look again :-)

#1.1 - Colin Turner said:
2008-05-14 23:10 - (Reply)

I should have said I'm talking about open source tools here. In terms of other tools, I think Visual SlickEdit, which we both used if I recall correctly was absolutely an awesome piece of cross platform software - but expensive, and more significantly it wasn't possible to fix some problems oneself. Anyway, is ZDE Eclipse based? I find Eclipse incredibly slow and bloated. As for remote file support, funnily, I think I never really do that any more, almost all my work is local files pushed elsewhere with SVN over SSH. However, I think this issue is in the FAQ (looking). Ah yes

QUOTE:
Q: Does Geany support editing files remotely through FTP or SSH? (^) A: No, Geany doesn't support any remote file editing. But you can easily mount remote filesystems through FTP, SSH or whatever with FUSE or LUFS. This is even better because the remote filesystem will become available for all your applications transparently.
I kind of assumed it would support Gnome's transparent remote file system support, but haven't checked since it's not an issue for me. You also mention this thing called Windows? Fortunately I don't use that ;-). would have to exclude Komodo at the minute, since I'


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