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Comment by omneity | Hacker News Reader

Congrats for the 2.0 release!

I always found Geany a real gem among the regular crop of IDEs. (and I did spend quite some time exploring the synaptic app store back in the day)

The level of focus and simplicity is hardly seen among its peers.

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I actually used Geany as my main editor for Ruby on Rails and ruby in general.

Python has pycharm, Java has intelliJ, but ruby has just RubyMine which doesn't have a community edition and also isn't very good (at least when I tried it like 5-8 years ago).

Geany was nice because while it didn't have autocomplete for anything but just text symbols, it did have enough Project-related features that it matched how I liked to view my files as a directory tree rooted at a project dir. And the syntax highlighting was good and so on.

I ended up switching to vscode (well, vscodium, anyway) after I used vscode at work. Maybe I should check up on Geany again as of this big 2.0 release. I'd like to use an actually-free editor, though I settle for vscodium-style "free" when there's a big delta in productivity and features.

> ruby has just RubyMine which doesn't have a community edition and also isn't very good

I have a great deal of sympathy for RubyMine (and shudder at working for the CLion team, whew) because Ruby isn't doing the IDE author any favors. Given:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/v16.5.0-ee/lib/g...

- what types are client_email and private_key? they are whatever type they're called with lolol

- the symbol Google::Auth::ServiceAccountCredentials just materializes; was it required in some containing context and thus is in scope by _this_ required file? are those symbols visible in every context from one of the various Gemfile lines? a hard-core rubyist knows

- where did the symbol StringIO come from? well, from require 'stringio' obviously, which is on .. err, which line exactly? I guess that lends weight to the 'this file is obviously running as a child context of some other file' theory

I think half of it is the culture of Rubyists and half of it is "productivity hacks" of "if it runs, then it must be correct"

I also recognize that I'm very clearly a static typing snob, and firmly in the camp of "please import symbols you use," but that doesn't stop me from having a great deal of sympathy for anyone who has to implement an IDE for such a monkey-patch friendly language

> I also recognize that I'm very clearly a static typing snob

Honestly I'm right with you. I was complaining in another ruby thread [0] the other day about how opaque ruby is in terms of context around what's actually happening and where things come from in a given block of code.

I'm about a year into working at a Rails shop and it's been a wild ride coming from a background of Swift/C++/Python. There's some cool syntax niceties in Ruby around writing functional blocks which I really like, but beyond that I find myself just endlessly frustrated with it as a tool. A lot of the senior folk at my org swear by ruby and know enough of Rails to have a good intuition about what's going on and how the system is organized, but for someone new to the whole enchilada it's so hard to find mental purchase in any given chunk of code.

> "if it runs, then it must be correct"

this has described the root of so many of the bugs I've had to chase down, holy crap.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37939011

How was indentation on Ruby code? I made a lisp plugin for Geany and the only way to customize the indentation was to install a keystroke handler for the enter key, which I found very strange coming from the vim world where there are specific hooks just for indentation.

Interesting, you went from vim where you were a power user enough to write a plugin to Geany? I've always had a warm spot for Geany but I just can't imagine the loss it would be for me to lose vim.

I did not go to Geany from vim; there were many people complaining about "having to learn Emacs to get a decent CL IDE" so I used Geany as the start for a more traditional IDE for Lisp.

LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp are the decent CL IDE.

Someone who is too much of a dilettante to learn Emacs is almost certainly too much of one to pay for an IDE.

It's software i really want to like. Unfortunately, the long start-up time makes me more often than not use something else.

Your computer is not as fast as the computers of the people who disagree with you.

Not necessarily. Once you are used to your editor opening in a few milliseconds, everything else feels like ages. I would argue the opposite: we have gotten used to slow software being the norm.

Geany does in fact open in milliseconds. By visual comparison, I can't measure a difference in startup speed compared to sublime text.

edit: I've tried Geany again and it's way faster than what I remember.

Cudos to trying again. Sometimes our memories fail us.

Was it of sufficient speed for your needs? It certainly takes longer to open than a couple of milliseconds. But I'm not aware of any GUI application that does.

Not that I would actually notice anyhow, given display latency of ~16ms at 60 Hz anyways :D

Actually I think within a second is fine. Either my memory is failing me or it has been optimised. Probably the former.

It's fast enough on my system that I open it from bash scripts when text editing is needed. It opens instantly.

Geany is snappy as hell. Brand-new astroturf account?

It's (mostly) snappy once it's started. Which takes something like 5-10 seconds on my PCs. But it keeps previous files in tabs over restart. And with each new geany installation, snappiness deteriorates soon and tabs accumulate until i have a clean up session. Might be an user issue, but this is my primary geany experience.

What are you talking about? I've never seen that. Many years and many machines. You've got something weird misconfigured somewhere like a plugin trying to do a failing dns lookup or something.

However I have seen mystery hangs in general, which can happen to almost anything.

I had a machine one time where a self-built version of midnight commander would always hang for several seconds on startup. Never saw that before or since. You can not say "mc takes something like 5-10 seconds to start up" even though it did on that machine that time.

I don't remember the details, but it turned out to be some combination of environment/context ie a particular terminal on a particular client sshing to a particular server where mc itself was, env variables, and/or setting in a mc config file. Might have been something to do with locale or TERM, or.. . I really have no idea anymore. But the hang was fixed by hunting down the config problem, and I've never seen it before that, nor since.

One of the releases from a few years (or months) back had this issue of slow startup whenever a certain number of files was opened. I experienced this a few months ago while installing the version included in Debian stable.

Following Geany updates fixed the issue, as far as I remember.

If you've got tens of files on an old machine that's probably to be expected. It's efficient with large files, written in C, and on a modern computer could open that many easily. My six year old laptop opens ten files from an encrypted drive in 2ish seconds.

I suppose it could load the interface first, then load the files, then parse and highlight them after the window is up, but don't feel like it would make a lot of difference until its done.

You may find projects useful. Can open the dozen files for one project, then close it, then open the next group from another project. Instead of every file you potentially might want to work on.

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