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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

I remember using Geany throughout high school for our Java/AP Computer Science classes, where it was the editor you were required to use. While I had it customized as much as the system would allow me, calling it an “IDE” is being a bit generous: my Sublime Text can do much, much more than Geany possibly could, and I’m not sure I would call even that an IDE. Geany is basically just a simple, slightly mediocre GUI text editor-which might be what you’re looking for in some cases-but do note that most people’s command-line text editor setups are generally more advanced than it. (If I could compare it to an editor, I’d say it’s just slightly more advanced than nano.)

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> Geany is basically just a simple, slightly mediocre GUI text editor-which might be what you’re looking for in some cases-but do note that most people’s command-line text editor setups are generally more advanced than it.

Not only that it can be used to compile programs directly, it's a bit more than just a basic editor. It has tabs, syntax highlighting, plugins, great line bookmarks, a function/symbol sidebar, autocomplete, multiline edit, color schemes, powerful search/replace and a sound way to wrap long lines.

Via plugins, it has a minimap, it can go directly to functions (ctrl + click on the function call), has a git integration (showing added/deleted lines not commited yet), highlight of the current variable, pretty print xml and much more stuff I do not use, like a workplace.

It's no nano (I use and like nano).

Nano can compile programs, has tabs, syntax highlighting, line bookmarks, color schemes (your terminal’s), search/replace, and an extremely unsound way to wrap long lines. And while there’s no official plugin system, LD_PRELOAD is always an option ;)

A bit more seriously, the things that Geany has that Nano doesn’t are a GUI and plugins. Personally, I consider that still a text editor, although I’m sure someone could write a LSP plugin to blur the lines a bit…

It has real tabs? Which you can click and that show the filename? And I'm also not aware of line bookmarks, and don't see them in the shortcut list? Also nothing for compiling the current project, but that I really might just miss.

The replace function though is a lot less powerful. Even if I give it the benefit of the doubt that probably there is a way to use regexpressions in an arcane syntax (because just entering them definitely does not work).

Though in general that exchange is typical for nano :) So many think it can do almost nothing and then are surprised when it can do so much more. Often included me. Like syntax highlighting, it was cool when I found out it can do that.

Yeah, the tabs show the filename. I have mouse support turned off so I’ve never checked if you can click on them, but I would expect that to work. IIRC bookmarks are bound to M-Insert by default; it should be in the man page somewhere. Regular expressions work if you press M-R once invoking the find dialog. Nano’s pretty powerful!

@saagarjha

can you share your nano configuration?

I can give you more than that, here’s my dotfiles: https://github.com/saagarjha/dotfiles. You may find that .nanorc a bit confusing so I suggest looking around at the other files with “nano” in their name for some context.

Click... in the VTY? I understand this is possible, I just did not realize people relied the functionality—it’s so easy to internalize truths like “people use the terminal to avoid using the mouse”.

Text user interfaces do have mouse support, though it has to be enabled by the running application (overriding the default use of mouse for copy/paste). `gpm` even gives you support in the text-only console. And it should work over a remote SSH connection.

I thought of that partly because my terminal can do that with its tabs, urxvt. Though it's not the same thing probably. But I know that nano has mouse support, which I have enabled.

But it was more to describe real tabs. I don't see them in nano, just a bar at the top with "[1/n] filename", and no tabs. Searching for nano and tabs does not help of course, and I saw nothing in the manpage. So it was a try to describe the kind of tabs geany has.

Yep - I find it very handy in vim (and yes, you can click on the tabs in vim too). Clicking and dragging selects things in visual mode, and you can also drag your tabs to reorder them.

Also works in tmux - you can drag your splits to resize them, or select a tmux "tab" to switch to it. You can also select text and then do things with it, like search back in the scrollback for other occurrences, or copy it to the system clipboard. Right click even brings up an in-cli context menu.

i use it in vim all the time, and in tmux.

It can write, build and debug code. It's an IDE.

And just like Sublime, Geany also have an API that third-parties can use for developing their own plugins/extensions. Since Geany is open source, might have even more plugins than Sublime, although I doubt that, Sublime has been way more popular than Geany for as long as I can remember.

Do you happen to know how to debug C++ or even just C, w/ Geany?

Agree: For me and many others the difference between a good text editor with plugins (jEdit, notepad++) and an actual IDE happens to be refactoring:

can the thing differ between xyz in a comment, as the name of a class, as a field and as a local variable inside a method? I.e. if I write a class xyz with a field xyz and a method xyz() and that method contains the variable xyz used a number of times, will the thing be able to rename any single of those across the whole project without messing up?

If it can: it is probably an ide. If not: it is not an ide.

I tend to agree, but then I wonder what we would call language server protocol additions to editors like Emacs/Vim. Or even Visual Studio Code, for that matter.

Good question. I'm using VSCode as an IDE for React now but I understand very well why some people use Webstorm.

> most people’s command-line text editor setups are generally more advanced than it

Is there any command-line text editor that people actually use to write in? My impression is that the only moderately popular ones are ed and sed and that people only use them to make specific edits to files they wrote the bulk of somewhere else.

You're joking, right? There are a huge number of people that use Emacs and Vim directly in the terminal; nobody uses ed or sed for general-purpose editing.

Oh, do people call Vim and Emacs command-line editors? I thought command-line programs were ones that either were used exclusively from the shell's command-line (like sed) or that when run presented you with their own command-line (like ed or gnuplot). I thought programs like Vim and Emacs were called "full-screen editors" or said to be TUIs (textual user interfaces).

Yah I think they are technically 'TUIs', but because they run in the shell, I think the parent comment was confused. Which is understandable IMO — I think most people lump things into either dedicated apps with a GUI, or programs without a full GUI that you run in the shell. But ultimately, you are correct.

Though, they don't run in the shell, they run in the terminal.

I agree with you that emacs and vim aren't CLI editors. Emacs is a GUI editor and vim is a TUI editor.

As to CLI editors... I use cat all the time to make notes. Because it's straightforward. Firing up vim or emacs would trigger a mental context-switch (caused by screen redraw), while cat is a good CLI citizen --- it's the best thing to make quick notes with 0 distractions.

Emacs is a TUI too, just like Vim is a GUI too.

> Emacs is a TUI too

That's an alternative way of using it. And half the things you have in GUI mode stop working.

> Vim is a GUI too

Are you speaking about GVim? That's still really a terminal with Vim launched. You still can't have e.g. headings in documents rendered at a different font size than the rest of the content. You still have to deal with the nonsense of patched fonts to get nice-looking arrows with powerline. Sounds like TUI to me.

> slightly more advanced than nano.

Sounds like you didn’t explore much, or try the plugins? It has an order of magnitude more functionality than nano.

I used it five days a week for a couple of years to write Java. Not sure I'd prefer it to nano, to be honest.

Micro is better than nano already, though both are simpler than geany (and terminal apps) so not very useful to compare.

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