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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

Geany drove me insane when I tried it. The horrific font rendering that turned underscores into spaces, the obtuse as hell format for custom syntax highlighting... No thanks man.

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OMG, i ran into this issue and what fixed it for me was...increasing the font size! Slowly over the last couple of years i have been increasing the font size everywhere (because my eyes are aging!)...and then i started using Geany - which i do like - but ran into this odd behavior of underscores appearing like spaces but only with some themes, fonts...And when i went to increase the font size - for just helping me see better - voila; no more odd behavior! Admittedly, this is not the reason i lessen my use of geany. But that sure was one odd bug.

EDIT: It seems the font/underscore/spaces issues should be fixed as of Geany verion 1.37: https://www.geany.org/documentation/faq/#geany-does-not-disp...

I'm not using Geany much at all any more, but still got love for it!

> The horrific font rendering that turned underscores into spaces

I have geany open right now and it is displaying underscores just fine with Noto Sans Mono. I have no idea what configuration you were using or what fonts, but this shouldn't be a problem currently.

https://github.com/geany/geany/issues/1387

I had the issue with the Flatpak version in an unmodified install on Fedora Silverblue 35, but my experience is apparently hardly unique.

I was thinking "this user is just unlucky" but I installed Geany from scratch and indeed underscores are invisible by default for me too! I switched fonts and it works.

A Scintilla bug fixed five years ago? Hex digits in a text file is obtuse? No software is perfect but there's probably better criticism out there.

The issue was closed, but that is not the same as being fixed.

The root problem it seems is that some fonts are out of spec, and there's a workaround:

    [styling]
    line_height=0;2;

I recommend Source Code Pro which is a great programming font and apparently doesn't have the problem, since I've never actually seen it.

if the often-default font is "out of spec" then the software has a problem they should mitigate somehow. Maybe pick a different default font if they can. I saw this underscore problem as soon as I installed Geany.

Was a problem for a few years on some Linux distros, should all be fixed now. Wasn't even their bug. Workaround was trivial, increase the line height. Let's focus on something slightly more interesting.

Ok, but I installed Geany today (to try it out) and it had that bug, so I mean, it's still out there.

If they can't even be bothered to listen to bug reports for such a simple and important thing then I have very little trust in their project.

This has been a bug for years after they closed the issue and as far as I am aware they are the only software to have ever had a problem with these supposedly out of spec fonts that are still the default on some popular distributions.

You sound entitled, honestly. I'm sure this brand new project has no bugs whatsoever, right?

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