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Geany
A fast, light, GTK+ IDE
Authors: Enrico Tröger
Nick Treleaven
Frank Lanitz
Colomban Wendling
Matthew Brush
Date: 2017-11-19
Version: 1.32
Copyright © 2005-2017
This document is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version. A copy of this license can be found in the file COPYING included with the source code of this program, and also in the chapter
GNU General Public License.
Contents
Introduction
About Geany
Where to get it
License
About this document
Installation
Requirements
Binary packages
Source compilation
Autotools based build system
Custom installation
Dynamic linking loader support and VTE
Build problems
Installation prefix
Usage
Getting started
The Geany workspace
Command line options
General
Startup
Opening files from the command-line in a running instance
Virtual terminal emulator widget (VTE)
Defining own widget styles using .gtkrc-2.0
Documents
Switching between documents
Cloning documents
Character sets and Unicode Byte-Order-Mark (BOM)
Using character sets
In-file encoding specification
Special encoding "None"
Unicode Byte-Order-Mark (BOM)
Editing
Folding
Column mode editing (rectangular selections)
Drag and drop of text
Indentation
Applying new indentation settings
Detecting indent type
Auto-indentation
Bookmarks
Code navigation history
Sending text through custom commands
Context actions
Autocompletion
Word part completion
Scope autocompletion
User-definable snippets
Snippet keybindings
Inserting Unicode characters
Search, replace and go to
Toolbar entries
Search bar
Find
Matching options
Find all
Change font in search dialog text fields
Find selection
Find usage
Find in files
Filtering out version control files
Replace
Replace all
Go to symbol definition
Go to symbol declaration
Go to line
Regular expressions
Multi-line regular expressions
View menu
Color schemes dialog
Symbols and tags files
Workspace symbols
Global tags files
Default global tags files
Global tags file format
Pipe-separated format
CTags format
Generating a global tags file
Generating C/C++ tags files
Generating tags files on Windows
C ignore.tags
Preferences
General Startup preferences
Startup
Shutdown
Paths
General Miscellaneous preferences
Miscellaneous
Search
Projects
Interface preferences
Sidebar
Message window
Fonts
Miscellaneous
Interface Notebook tab preferences
Editor tabs
Tab positions
Interface Toolbar preferences
Toolbar
Appearance
Editor Features preferences
Features
Editor Indentation preferences
Indentation group
Editor Completions preferences
Completions
Auto-close quotes and brackets
Editor Display preferences
Display
Long line marker
Virtual spaces
Files preferences
New files
Saving files
Miscellaneous
Tools preferences
Tool paths
Commands
Template preferences
Template data
Keybinding preferences
Printing preferences
Various preferences
Statusbar Templates
Terminal (VTE) preferences
Terminal widget
Project management
New project
Project properties
Open project
Close project
Build menu
Indicators
Default build menu items
Compile
Build
Lint
Make
Make custom target
Make object
Next error
Previous error
Execute
Stopping running processes
Terminal emulators
Set build commands
Build menu configuration
Build menu commands dialog
Substitutions in commands and working directories
Build menu keyboard shortcuts
Old settings
Printing support
Plugins
Plugin manager
Keybindings
Switching documents
Configurable keybindings
File keybindings
Editor keybindings
Clipboard keybindings
Select keybindings
Insert keybindings
Format keybindings
Settings keybindings
Search keybindings
Go to keybindings
View keybindings
Focus keybindings
Notebook tab keybindings
Document keybindings
Project keybindings
Build keybindings
Tools keybindings
Help keybindings
Configuration files
Configuration file paths
Paths on Unix-like systems
Paths on Windows
Tools menu items
Global configuration file
Filetype definition files
Filenames
System files
User files
Custom filetypes
Creating a custom filetype from an existing filetype
Filetype configuration
[styling] section
Using a named style
Reading styles from another filetype
[keywords] section
[lexer_properties] section
[settings] section
[indentation] section
[build_settings] section
Special file filetypes.common
[named_styles] section
[named_colors] section
[styling] section
[settings] section
Filetype extensions
Filetype group membership
Preferences file format
[build-menu] section
Project file format
[build-menu] additions
Templates
Template meta data
File templates
Adding file templates
Customizing templates
Template wildcards
Special {command:} wildcard
Customizing the toolbar
Manually editing the toolbar layout
Available toolbar elements
Plugin documentation
HTML Characters
Insert entity dialog
Replace special chars by its entity
At typing time
Bulk replacement
Save Actions
Auto Save
Save on focus out
Instant Save
Backup Copy
Contributing to this document
Scintilla keyboard commands
Keyboard commands
Tips and tricks
Document notebook
Editor
Interface
GTK-related
Compile-time options
src/geany.h
project.h
filetypes.c
editor.h
keyfile.c
build.c
GNU General Public License
License for Scintilla and SciTE
Introduction
About Geany
Geany is a small and lightweight Integrated Development Environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies on
other packages. Another goal was to be as independent as possible from a particular Desktop Environment like KDE or GNOME - Geany only requires the GTK+
runtime libraries.
Syntax highlighting
Code folding
Autocompletion of symbols/words
Construct completion/snippets
Auto-closing of XML and HTML tags
Calltips
Many supported filetypes including C, Java, PHP, HTML, Python, Perl, Pascal, and others
Symbol lists
Code navigation
Build system to compile and execute your code
Simple project management
Plugin interface
Where to get it
You can obtain Geany from http://www.geany.org/ or perhaps also from your distribution. For a list of available packages, please see http://www.geany.org
/Download/ThirdPartyPackages.
License
Geany is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version. A copy of this license can be found in the file COPYING included with the source code of this program and in the chapter, GNU General
Public License.
The included Scintilla library (found in the subdirectory scintilla/) has its own license, which can be found in the chapter, License for Scintilla and SciTE.
Installation
Requirements
You will need the GTK (>= 2.24) libraries and their dependencies (Pango, GLib and ATK). Your distro should provide packages for these, usually installed by
default. For Windows, you can download an installer from the website which bundles these libraries.
Binary packages
There are many binary packages available. For an up-to-date but maybe incomplete list see http://www.geany.org/Download/ThirdPartyPackages.
Source compilation
Compiling Geany is quite easy. To do so, you need the GTK (>= 2.24) libraries and header files. You also need the Pango, GLib and ATK libraries and header files.
All these files are available at http://www.gtk.org, but very often your distro will provide development packages to save the trouble of building these yourself.
Furthermore you need, of course, a C and C++ compiler. The GNU versions of these tools are recommended.
To compile Geany yourself, you just need the Make tool, preferably GNU Make.
$ ./configure
$ make
Then as root:
% make install
Or via sudo:
Custom installation
The configure script supports several common options, for a detailed list, type:
$ ./configure --help
You may also want to read the INSTALL file for advanced installation options.
In the case that your system lacks dynamic linking loader support, you probably want to pass the option --disable-vte to the configure script. This prevents compiling
Geany with dynamic linking loader support for automatically loading libvte.so.4 if available.
Build problems
If there are any errors during compilation, check your build environment and try to find the error, otherwise contact the mailing list or one the authors.
Sometimes you might need to ask for specific help from your distribution.
Installation prefix
If you want to find Geany's system files after installation you may want to know the installation prefix.
Pass the --print-prefix option to Geany to check this - see Command line options. The first path is the prefix.
On Unix-like systems this is commonly /usr if you installed from a binary package, or /usr/local if you build from source.
Note
Editing system files is not necessary as you should use the per-user configuration files instead, which don't need root permissions. See Configuration files.
Usage
Getting started
You can start Geany in the following ways:
Choose in your application menu of your used Desktop Environment: Development --> Geany.
At Windows-systems you will find Geany after installation inside the application menu within its special folder.
To start Geany from a command line, type the following and press Return:
% geany
The menu.
An optional toolbar.
An optional sidebar that can show the following tabs:
Most of these can be configured in the Interface preferences, the View menu, or the popup menu for the relevant area.
Additional tabs may be added to the sidebar and message window by plugins.
The sizes of the sidebar and message window can be adjusted by dragging the dividers.
none --ft-names Print a list of Geany's internal filetype names (useful for snippets configuration).
-g --generate-tags Generate a global tags file (see Generating a global tags file).
-P --no-preprocessing Don't preprocess C/C++ files when generating tags file.
-i --new-instance Do not open files in a running instance, force opening a new instance. Only available if Geany was compiled with
support for Sockets.
-l --line Set initial line number for the first opened file.
none --list-documents Return a list of open documents in a running Geany instance. This can be used to read the currently opened
documents in Geany from an external script or tool. The returned list is separated by newlines (LF) and consists of
the full, UTF-8 encoded filenames of the documents. Only available if Geany was compiled with support for Sockets.
-m --no-msgwin Do not show the message window. Use this option if you do not need compiler messages or VTE support.
-n --no-ctags Do not load symbol completion and call tip data. Use this option if you do not want to use them.
-p --no-plugins Do not load plugins or plugin support.
none --print-prefix Print installation prefix, the data directory, the lib directory and the locale directory (in that order) to stdout, one
line each. This is mainly intended for plugin authors to detect installation paths.
-r --read-only Open all files given on the command line in read-only mode. This only applies to files opened explicitly from the
command line, so files from previous sessions or project files are unaffected.
-s --no-session Do not load the previous session's files.
-t --no-terminal Do not load terminal support. Use this option if you do not want to load the virtual terminal emulator widget at
startup. If you do not have libvte.so.4 installed, then terminal-support is automatically disabled. Only available if
Geany was compiled with support for VTE.
none --socket-file
Use this socket filename for communication with a running Geany instance. This can be used with the following
command to execute Geany on the current workspace:
none --vte-lib Specify explicitly the path including filename or only the filename to the VTE library, e.g. /usr/lib/libvte.so or
libvte.so. This option is only needed when the auto-detection does not work. Only available if Geany was compiled
with support for VTE.
-v --verbose Be verbose (print useful status messages).
-V --version Show version information and exit.
-? --help Show help information and exit.
none [files ...]
Open all given files at startup. This option causes Geany to ignore loading stored files from the last session (if
enabled). Geany also recognizes line and column information when appended to the filename with colons, e.g.
"geany foo.bar:10:5" will open the file foo.bar and place the cursor in line 10 at column 5.
Projects can also be opened but a project file (*.geany) must be the first non-option argument. All additionally given
files are ignored.
You can also pass line number and column number information, e.g.:
geany some_file.foo:55:4
Geany supports all generic GTK options, a list is available on the help screen.
General
Startup
At startup, Geany loads all files from the last time Geany was launched. You can disable this feature in the preferences dialog (see General Startup preferences).
You can start several instances of Geany, but only the first will load files from the last session. In the subsequent instances, you can find these files in the file menu
under the "Recent files" item. By default this contains the last 10 recently opened files. You can change the number of recently opened files in the preferences
dialog.
To run a second instance of Geany, do not specify any filenames on the command-line, or disable opening files in a running instance using the appropriate
command line option.
Geany detects if there is an instance of itself already running and opens files from the command-line in that instance. So, Geany can be used to view and edit files
by opening them from other programs such as a file manager.
You can also pass line number and column number information, e.g.:
geany some_file.foo:55:4
This would open the file some_file.foo with the cursor on line 55, column 4.
If you do not like this for some reason, you can disable using the first instance by using the appropriate command line option -- see the section called Command
line options.
If you have installed libvte.so on your system, it is loaded automatically by Geany, and you will have a terminal widget in the notebook at the bottom.
If Geany cannot find any libvte.so at startup, the terminal widget will not be loaded. So there is no need to install the package containing this file in order to run
Geany. Additionally, you can disable the use of the terminal widget by command line option, for more information see the section called Command line options.
You can use this terminal (from now on called VTE) much as you would a terminal program like xterm. There is basic clipboard support. You can paste the
contents of the clipboard by pressing the right mouse button to open the popup menu, and choosing Paste. To copy text from the VTE, just select the desired text
and then press the right mouse button and choose Copy from the popup menu. On systems running the X Window System you can paste the last selected text by
pressing the middle mouse button in the VTE (on 2-button mice, the middle button can often be simulated by pressing both mouse buttons together).
In the preferences dialog you can specify a shell which should be started in the VTE. To make the specified shell a login shell just use the appropriate command
line options for the shell. These options should be found in the manual page of the shell. For zsh and bash you can use the argument --login.
Note
Geany tries to load libvte.so. If this fails, it tries to load some other filenames. If this fails too, you should check whether you installed libvte correctly. Again note,
Geany will run without this library.
It could be, that the library is called something else than libvte.so (e.g. on FreeBSD 6.0 it is called libvte.so.8). If so please set a link to the correct file (as root):
# ln -s /usr/lib/libvte.so.X /usr/lib/libvte.so
Obviously, you have to adjust the paths and set X to the number of your libvte.so.
You can also specify the filename of the VTE library to use on the command line (see the section called Command line options) or at compile time by specifying the
command line option --with-vte-module-path to ./configure.
You can define your widget style for many of Geany's GUI parts. To do this, just edit your .gtkrc-2.0 (usually found in your home directory on UNIX-like systems and
in the etc subdirectory of your Geany installation on Windows).
To have a defined style used by Geany you must assign it to at least one of Geany's widgets. For example use the following line:
This would assign your style "geany_style" to all Geany widgets. You can also assign styles only to specific widgets. At the moment you can use the following
widgets:
GeanyMainWindow
GeanyEditMenu
GeanyToolbarMenu
GeanyDialog
GeanyDialogPrefs
GeanyDialogProject
GeanyDialogSearch
GeanyMenubar
GeanyToolbar
style "geanyStyle"
{
font_name="Sans 12"
}
widget "GeanyMainWindow" style "geanyStyle"
style "geanyStyle"
{
font_name="Sans 10"
}
widget "GeanyPrefsDialog" style "geanyStyle"
Documents
Switching between documents
The documents list and the editor tabs are two different ways to switch between documents using the mouse. When you hit the key combination to move between
tabs, the order is determined by the tab order. It is not alphabetical as shown in the documents list (regardless of whether or not editor tabs are visible).
See the Notebook tab keybindings section for useful shortcuts including for Most-Recently-Used document switching.
Cloning documents
The Document->Clone menu item copies the current document's text, cursor position and properties into a new untitled document. If there is a selection, only the
selected text is copied. This can be useful when making temporary copies of text or for creating documents with similar or identical contents.
Geany 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. To do this, Geany uses the character conversion capabilities of the GLib library.
Only text files are supported, i.e. opening files which contain NULL-bytes may fail. Geany 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.
Geany 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.
This opens the file with the encoding specified in the encoding drop down box. If the encoding is set to "Detect from file" auto-detection will be used. If the
encoding is set to "Without encoding (None)" the file will be opened without any character conversion and Geany will not try to auto-detect the encoding (see
below for more information).
This item reloads the current file with the specified encoding. It can help if you opened a file and found out that the wrong encoding was used.
Contrary to the above two options, this will not change or reload the current file unless you save it. It is useful when you want to change the encoding of the
file.
As mentioned above, auto-detecting the encoding of a file may fail on some encodings. If you know that Geany doesn't open a certain file, you can add the
specification line, described in the next section, to the beginning of the file to force Geany to use a specific encoding when opening the file.
Geany detects meta tags of HTML files which contain charset information like:
and the specified charset is used when opening the file. This is useful if the encoding of the file cannot be detected properly. For non-HTML files you can also
define a line like:
/* geany_encoding=ISO-8859-15 */
or:
# geany_encoding=ISO-8859-15 #
to force an encoding to be used. The #, /* and */ are examples of filetype-specific comment characters. It doesn't matter which characters are around the string "
geany_encoding=ISO-8859-15 " as long as there is at least one whitespace character before and after this string. Whitespace characters are in this case a space
or tab character. An example to use this could be you have a file with ISO-8859-15 encoding but Geany constantly detects the file encoding as ISO-8859-1. Then
you simply add such a line to the file and Geany will open it correctly the next time.
Since Geany 0.15 you can also use lines which match the regular expression used to find the encoding string: coding[\t ]*[:=][\t ]*([a-z0-9-]+)[\t ]*
Note
These specifications must be in the first 512 bytes of the file. Anything after the first 512 bytes will not be recognized.
# encoding = ISO-8859-15
or:
# coding: ISO-8859-15
There is a special encoding "None" which uses no encoding. It is useful when you know that Geany cannot auto-detect the encoding of a file and it is not displayed
correctly. Especially when the file contains NULL-bytes this can be useful to skip auto detection and open the file properly at least until the occurrence of the first
NULL-byte. Using this encoding opens the file as it is without any character conversion.
Furthermore, Geany detects a Unicode Byte Order Mark (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark for details). Of course, this feature is only available if
the opened file is in a Unicode encoding. 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. On Unix-
like systems using a Byte Order Mark could cause some problems for programs not expecting it, e.g. the compiler gcc stops with stray errors, PHP does not parse
a script containing a BOM and script files starting with a she-bang maybe cannot be started. In the status bar you can easily see whether the file starts with a
BOM or not.
If you want to set a BOM for a file or if you want to remove it from a file, just use the document menu and toggle the checkbox.
Note
If you are unsure what a BOM is or if you do not understand where to use it, then it is probably not important for you and you can safely ignore it.
Editing
Folding
Geany provides basic code folding support. Folding means the ability to show and hide parts of the text in the current file. You can hide unimportant code sections
and concentrate on the parts you are working on and later you can show hidden sections again. In the editor window there is a small grey margin on the left side
with [+] and [-] symbols which show hidden parts and hide parts of the file respectively. By clicking on these icons you can simply show and hide sections which
are marked by vertical lines within this margin. For many filetypes nested folding is supported, so there may be several fold points within other fold points.
Note
You can customize the folding icon and line styles - see the filetypes.common Folding Settings.
If you don't like it or don't need it at all, you can simply disable folding support completely in the preferences dialog.
The folding behaviour can be changed with the "Fold/Unfold all children of a fold point" option in the preference dialog. If activated, Geany will unfold all nested
fold points below the current one if they are already folded (when clicking on a [+] symbol). When clicking on a [-] symbol, Geany will fold all nested fold points
below the current one if they are unfolded.
This option can be inverted by pressing the Shift key while clicking on a fold symbol. That means, if the "Fold/Unfold all children of a fold point" option is enabled,
pressing Shift will disable it for this click and vice versa.
There is basic support for column mode editing. To use it, create a rectangular selection by holding down the Control and Shift keys (or Alt and Shift on Windows)
while selecting some text. Once a rectangular selection exists you can start editing the text within this selection and the modifications will be done for every line
in the selection.
It is also possible to create a zero-column selection - this is useful to insert text on multiple lines.
If you drag selected text in the editor widget of Geany the text is moved to the position where the mouse pointer is when releasing the mouse button. Holding
Control when releasing the mouse button will copy the text instead. This behaviour was changed in Geany 0.11 - before the selected text was copied to the new
position.
Indentation
Geany allows each document to indent either with a tab character, multiple spaces or a combination of both.
The Tabs setting indents with one tab character per indent level, and displays tabs as the indent width.
The Spaces setting indents with the number of spaces set in the indent width for each level.
The Tabs and Spaces setting indents with spaces as above, then converts as many spaces as it can to tab characters at the rate of one tab for each multiple of the
Various preference setting indent_hard_tab_width (default 8) and displays tabs as the indent_hard_tab_width value.
The default indent settings are set in Editor Indentation preferences (see the link for more information).
The default settings can be overridden per-document using the Document menu. They can also be overridden by projects - see Project management.
The indent mode for the current document is shown on the status bar as follows:
TAB
Indent with Tab characters.
SP
Indent with spaces.
T/S
Indent with tabs and spaces, depending on how much indentation is on a line.
After changing the default settings you may wish to apply the new settings to every document in the current session. To do this use the Project->Apply Default
Indentation menu item.
The Detect from file indentation preference can be used to scan each file as it's opened and set the indent type based on how many lines start with a tab vs. 2 or
more spaces.
Auto-indentation
When enabled, auto-indentation happens when pressing Enter in the Editor. It adds a certain amount of indentation to the new line so the user doesn't always
have to indent each line manually.
None
Disables auto-indentation completely.
Basic
Adds the same amount of whitespace on a new line as on the previous line. For the Tabs and the Spaces indent types the indentation will use the same
combination of characters as the previous line. The Tabs and Spaces indentation type converts as explained above.
Current chars
Does the same as Basic but also indents a new line after an opening brace '{', and de-indents when typing a closing brace '}'. For Python, a new line will be
indented after typing ':' at the end of the previous line.
Match braces
Similar to Current chars but the closing brace will be aligned to match the indentation of the line with the opening brace. This requires the filetype to be one
where Geany knows that the Scintilla lexer understands matching braces (C, C++, D, HTML, Pascal, Bash, Perl, TCL).
There is also XML-tag auto-indentation. This is enabled when the mode is more than just Basic, and is also controlled by a filetype setting - see xml_indent_tags.
Bookmarks
Geany provides a handy bookmarking feature that lets you mark one or more lines in a document, and return the cursor to them using a key combination.
To place a mark on a line, either left-mouse-click in the left margin of the editor window, or else use Ctrl-m. This will produce a small green plus symbol in the
margin. You can have as many marks in a document as you like. Click again (or use Ctrl-m again) to remove the bookmark. To remove all the marks in a given
document, use "Remove Markers" in the Document menu.
To navigate down your document, jumping from one mark to the next, use Ctrl-. (control period). To go in the opposite direction on the page, use Ctrl-, (control
comma). Using the bookmarking feature together with the commands to switch from one editor tab to another (Ctrl-PgUp/PgDn and Ctrl-Tab) provides a
particularly fast way to navigate around multiple files.
To ease navigation in source files and especially between different files, Geany lets you jump between different navigation points. Currently, this works for the
following:
Go to symbol declaration
Go to symbol definition
Symbol list items
Build errors
Message items
When using one of these actions, Geany remembers your current position and jumps to the new one. If you decide to go back to your previous position in the file,
just use "Navigate back a location". To get back to the new position again, just use "Navigate forward a location". This makes it easier to navigate in e.g. foreign
code and between different files.
You can define several custom commands in Geany and send the current selection to one of these commands using the Edit->Format->Send Selection to menu or
keybindings. The output of the command will be used to replace the current selection. This makes it possible to use text formatting tools with Geany in a general
way.
The selected text will be sent to the standard input of the executed command, so the command should be able to read from it and it should print all results to its
standard output which will be read by Geany. To help finding errors in executing the command, the output of the program's standard error will be printed on
Geany's standard output.
To add a custom command, use the Send Selection to->Set Custom Commands menu item. Click on Add to get a new item and type the command. You can also
specify some command line options. Empty commands are not saved.
sed 's/\./(dot)/g'
The above example would normally be done with the Replace all function, but it can be handy to have common commands already set up.
Note that the command is not run in a shell, so if you want to use shell features like pipes and command chains, you need to explicitly launch the shell and pass it
your command:
sh -c 'sort | uniq'
Context actions
You can execute the context action command on the current word at the cursor position or the available selection. This word or selection can be used as an
argument to the command. The context action is invoked by a menu entry in the popup menu of the editor and also a keyboard shortcut (see the section called
Keybindings).
The command can be specified in the preferences dialog and also for each filetype (see "context_action_cmd" in the section called Filetype configuration). When
the context action is invoked, the filetype specific command is used if available, otherwise the command specified in the preferences dialog is executed.
The current word or selection can be referred with the wildcard "%s" in the command, it will be replaced by the current word or selection before the command is
executed.
For example a context action can be used to open API documentation in a browser window, the command to open the PHP API documentation would be:
firefox "http://www.php.net/%s"
when executing the command, the %s is substituted by the word near the cursor position or by the current selection. If the cursor is at the word "echo", a browser
window will open(assumed your browser is called firefox) and it will open the address: http://www.php.net/echo.
Autocompletion
Geany can offer a list of possible completions for symbols defined in the tags files and for all words in open documents.
The autocompletion list for symbols is presented when the first few characters of the symbol are typed (configurable, see Editor Completions preferences, default
4) or when the Complete word keybinding is pressed (configurable, see Editor keybindings, default Ctrl-Space).
When the defined keybinding is typed and the Autocomplete all words in document preference (in Editor Completions preferences) is selected then the
autocompletion list will show all matching words in the document, if there are no matching symbols.
If you don't want to use autocompletion it can be dismissed until the next symbol by pressing Escape. The autocompletion list is updated as more characters are
typed so that it only shows completions that start with the characters typed so far. If no symbols begin with the sequence, the autocompletion window is closed.
The up and down arrows will move the selected item. The highlighted item on the autocompletion list can be chosen from the list by pressing Enter/Return. You
can also double-click to select an item. The sequence will be completed to match the chosen item, and if the Drop rest of word on completion preference is set (in
Editor Completions preferences) then any characters after the cursor that match a symbol or word are deleted.
By default, pressing Tab will complete the selected item by word part; useful e.g. for adding the prefix gtk_combo_box_entry_ without typing it manually:
gtk_com<TAB>
gtk_combo_<TAB>
gtk_combo_box_<e><TAB>
gtk_combo_box_entry_<s><ENTER>
gtk_combo_box_entry_set_text_column
The key combination can be changed from Tab - See Editor keybindings. If you clear/change the key combination for word part completion, Tab will complete the
whole word instead, like Enter.
Scope autocompletion
E.g.:
struct
{
int i;
char c;
} foo;
When you type foo. it will show an autocompletion list with 'i' and 'c' symbols.
It only works for languages that set parent scope names for e.g. struct members. Currently this means C-like languages. The C parser only parses global scopes,
so this won't work for structs or objects declared in local scope.
User-definable snippets
Snippets are small strings or code constructs which can be replaced or completed to a more complex string. So you can save a lot of time when typing common
strings and letting Geany do the work for you. To know what to complete or replace Geany reads a configuration file called snippets.conf at startup.
Maybe you need to often type your name, so define a snippet like this:
[Default]
myname=Enrico Tröger
Every time you write myname <TAB> in Geany, it will replace "myname" with "Enrico Tröger". The key to start autocompletion can be changed in the preferences
dialog, by default it is TAB. The corresponding keybinding is called Complete snippet.
Paths
You can override the default snippets using the user snippets.conf file. Use the Tools->Configuration Files->snippets.conf menu item. See also Configuration file
paths.
This adds the default settings to the user file if the file doesn't exist. Alternatively the file can be created manually, adding only the settings you want to change.
All missing settings will be read from the system snippets file.
Snippet groups
The file snippets.conf contains sections defining snippets that are available for particular filetypes and in general.
The two sections "Default" and "Special" apply to all filetypes. "Default" contains all snippets which are available for every filetype and "Special" contains snippets
which can only be used in other snippets. So you can define often used parts of snippets and just use the special snippet as a placeholder (see the snippets.conf for
details).
You can define sections with the name of a filetype eg "C++". The snippets in that section are only available for use in files with that filetype. Snippets in filetype
sections will hide snippets with the same name in the "Default" section when used in a file of that filetype.
To define snippets you can use several special character sequences which will be replaced when using the snippet:
\n or %newline% Insert a new line (it will be replaced by the used EOL char(s): LF, CR/LF, or CR).
\t or %ws% Insert an indentation step, it will be replaced according to the current document's indent mode.
\s \s to force whitespace at beginning or end of a value ('key= value' won't work, use 'key=\svalue')
%cursor% Place the cursor at this position after completion has been done. You can define multiple %cursor% wildcards and use the
keybinding Move cursor in snippet to jump to the next defined cursor position in the completed snippet.
%...% "..." means the name of a key in the "Special" section. If you have defined a key "brace_open" in the "Special" section you can
use %brace_open% in any other snippet.
Snippet names must not contain spaces otherwise they won't work correctly. But beside that you can define almost any string as a snippet and use it later in
Geany. It is not limited to existing contructs of certain programming languages(like if, for, switch). Define whatever you need.
Template wildcards
Since Geany 0.15 you can also use most of the available templates wildcards listed in Template wildcards. All wildcards which are listed as available in snippets
can be used. For instance to improve the above example:
[Default]
myname=My name is {developer}
mysystem=My system: {command:uname -a}
this will replace myname with "My name is " and the value of the template preference developer.
Word characters
You can change the way Geany recognizes the word to complete, that is how the start and end of a word is recognised when the snippet completion is requested.
The section "Special" may contain a key "wordchars" which lists all characters a string may contain to be recognized as a word for completion. Leave it
commented to use default characters or define it to add or remove characters to fit your needs.
Snippet keybindings
Normally you would type the snippet name and press Tab. However, you can define keybindings for snippets under the Keybindings group in snippets.conf:
[Keybindings]
for=<Ctrl>7
block_cursor=<Ctrl>8
Note
You can insert Unicode code points by hitting Ctrl-Shift-u, then still holding Ctrl-Shift, type some hex digits representing the code point for the character you want
and hit Enter or Return (still holding Ctrl-Shift). If you release Ctrl-Shift before hitting Enter or Return (or any other character), the code insertion is completed,
but the typed character is also entered. In the case of Enter/Return, it is a newline, as you might expect.
In some earlier versions of Geany, you might need to first unbind Ctrl-Shift-u in the keybinding preferences, then select Tools->Reload Configuration or restart
Geany. Note that it works slightly differently from other GTK applications, in that you'll need to continue to hold down the Ctrl and Shift keys while typing the
code point hex digits (and the Enter or Return to finish the code point).
Find
Find selection
Find usage
Find in files
Replace
Go to symbol definition
Go to symbol declaration
Go to line
Toolbar entries
Search bar
Go to line entry
There are keybindings to focus each of these - see Focus keybindings. Pressing Escape will then focus the editor.
Search bar
The quickest way to find some text is to use the search bar entry in the toolbar. This performs a case-insensitive search in the current document whilst you type.
Pressing Enter will search again, and pressing Shift-Enter will search backwards.
Find
The Find dialog is used for finding text in one or more open documents.
Matching options
The syntax for the Use regular expressions option is shown in Regular expressions.
Note
The Use multi-line matching option enables multi-line regular expressions instead of single-line ones. See Regular expressions for more details on the differences
between the two modes.
The Use escape sequences option will transform any escaped characters into their UTF-8 equivalent. For example, \t will be transformed into a tab character.
Other recognized symbols are: \\, \n, \r, \uXXXX (Unicode characters).
Find all
To find all matches, click on the Find All expander. This will reveal several options:
In Document
In Session
Mark
Find All In Document will show a list of matching lines in the current document in the Messages tab of the Message Window. Find All In Session does the same for
all open documents.
Mark will highlight all matches in the current document with a colored box. These markers can be removed by selecting the Remove Markers command from the
Document menu.
All search related dialogs use a Monospace for the text input fields to increase the readability of input text. This is useful when you are typing input such as
regular expressions with spaces, periods and commas which might it hard to read with a proportional font.
If you want to change the font, you can do this easily by inserting the following style into your .gtkrc-2.0 (usually found in your home directory on UNIX-like
systems and in the etc subdirectory of your Geany installation on Windows):
style "search_style"
{
font_name="Monospace 8"
}
widget "GeanyDialogSearch.*.GtkEntry" style:highest "search_style"
Please note the addition of ":highest" in the last line which sets the priority of this style to the highest available. Otherwise, the style is ignored for the search
dialogs.
Find selection
The Find Next/Previous Selection commands perform a search for the current selected text. If nothing is selected, by default the current word is used instead.
This can be customized by the find_selection_type preference - see Various preferences.
Find usage
Find Usage searches all open files. It is similar to the Find All In Session option in the Find dialog.
If there is a selection, then it is used as the search text; otherwise the current word is used. The current word is either taken from the word nearest the edit
cursor, or the word underneath the popup menu click position when the popup menu is used. The search results are shown in the Messages tab of the Message
Window.
Note
You can also use Find Usage for symbol list items from the popup menu.
Find in files
Find in Files is a more powerful version of Find Usage that searches all files in a certain directory using the Grep tool. The Grep tool must be correctly set in
Preferences to the path of the system's Grep utility. GNU Grep is recommended (see note below).
The Search field is initially set to the current word in the editor (depending on Search preferences).
The Files setting allows to choose which files are included in the search, depending on the mode:
All
Search in all files;
Project
Use the current project's patterns, see Project properties;
Custom
Use custom patterns.
Both project and custom patterns use a glob-style syntax, each pattern separated by a space. To search all .c and .h files, use: *.c *.h. Note that an empty pattern
list searches in all files rather than none.
The Directory field is initially set to the current document's directory, unless this field has already been edited and the current document has not changed.
Otherwise, the current document's directory is prepended to the drop-down history. This can be disabled - see Search preferences.
The Encoding field can be used to define the encoding of the files to be searched. The entered search text is converted to the chosen encoding and the search
results are converted back to UTF-8.
The Extra options field is used to pass any additional arguments to the grep tool.
Note
The Files setting uses --include= when searching recursively, Recurse in subfolders uses -r; both are GNU Grep options and may not work with other Grep
implementations.
When using the Recurse in subfolders option with a directory that's under version control, you can set the Extra options field to filter out version control files.
If you have GNU Grep >= 2.5.2 you can use the --exclude-dir argument to filter out CVS and hidden directories like .svn.
If you have an older Grep, you can try using the --exclude flag to filter out filenames.
The --exclude argument only matches the file name part, not the path.
Replace
The Replace dialog is used for replacing text in one or more open documents.
The Replace dialog has the same options for matching text as the Find dialog. See the section Matching options.
The Use regular expressions option allows regular expressions to be used in the search string and back references in the replacement text -- see the entry for '\n'
in Regular expressions.
Replace all
To replace several matches, click on the Replace All expander. This will reveal several options:
In Document
In Session
In Selection
Replace All In Document will replace all matching text in the current document. Replace All In Session does the same for all open documents. Replace All In
Selection will replace all matching text in the current selection of the current document.
Go to symbol definition
If the current word or selection is the name of a symbol definition (e.g. a function name) and the file containing the symbol definition is open, this command will
switch to that file and go to the corresponding line number. The current word is either the word nearest the edit cursor, or the word underneath the popup menu
click position when the popup menu is used.
If there are more symbols with the same name to which the goto can be performed, a pop up is shown with a list of all the occurrences. After selecting a symbol
from the list Geany jumps to the corresponding symbol location. Geany tries to suggest the nearest symbol (symbol from the current file, other open documents or
current directory) as the best candidate for the goto and places this symbol at the beginning of the list typed in boldface.
Note
If the corresponding symbol is on the current line, Geany will first look for a symbol declaration instead, as this is more useful. Likewise Go to symbol declaration
will search for a symbol definition first in this case also.
Go to symbol declaration
Like Go to symbol definition, but for a forward declaration such as a C function prototype or extern declaration instead of a function body.
Go to line
Regular expressions
You can use regular expressions in the Find and Replace dialogs by selecting the Use regular expressions check box (see Matching options). The syntax is Perl
compatible. Basic syntax is described in the table below. For full details, see http://www.geany.org/manual/gtk/glib/glib-regex-syntax.html.
By default regular expressions are matched on a line-by-line basis. If you are interested in multi-line regular expressions, matched against the whole buffer at
once, see the section Multi-line regular expressions below.
Note
1. The Use escape sequences dialog option always applies for regular expressions.
2. Searching backwards with regular expressions is not supported.
3. The Use multi-line matching dialog option to select single or multi-line matching.
If the search string was Fred([1-9])XXX and the replace string was Sam\1YYY, when applied to Fred2XXX this would generate Sam2YYY.
d: decimal digits
D: any char except decimal digits
s: whitespace (space, \t \n \r \f \v)
S: any char except whitespace (see above)
w: alphanumeric & underscore
W: any char except alphanumeric & underscore
\x This allows you to use a character x that would otherwise have a special meaning. For example, \[ would be interpreted as [ and not as the start
of a character set. Use \\ for a literal backslash.
[...]
Matches one of the characters in the set. If the first character in the set is ^, it matches the characters NOT in the set, i.e. complements the set.
A shorthand S-E (start dash end) is used to specify a set of characters S up to E, inclusive.
The special characters ] and - have no special meaning if they appear first in the set. - can also be last in the set. To include both, put ] first: []A-
Z-].
Examples:
^ This matches the start of a line (unless used inside a set, see above).
$ This matches the end of a line.
* This matches 0 or more times. For example, Sa*m matches Sm, Sam, Saam, Saaam and so on.
+ This matches 1 or more times. For example, Sa+m matches Sam, Saam, Saaam and so on.
? This matches 0 or 1 time(s). For example, Joh?n matches John, Jon.
Note
This table is adapted from Scintilla and SciTE documentation, distributed under the License for Scintilla and SciTE.
Note
The Use multi-line matching dialog option enables multi-line regular expressions.
Multi-line regular expressions work just like single-line ones but a match can span several lines.
. Matches any character but newlines. This behavior can be changed to also match newlines using the (?s) option, see http://www.geany.org/manual
/gtk/glib/glib-regex-syntax.html#idp5671632
[^...] A negative range (see above) will match newlines if they are not explicitly listed in that negative range. For example, range [^a-z] will match
newlines, while range [^a-z\r\n] won't. While this is the expected behavior, it can lead to tricky problems if one doesn't think about it when writing
an expression.
View menu
The View menu allows various elements of the main window to be shown or hidden, and also provides various display-related editor options.
The Color Schemes dialog is available under the View->Change Color Scheme menu item. It lists various color schemes for editor highlighting styles, including
the default scheme first. Other items are available based on what color scheme files Geany found at startup.
Color scheme files are read from the Configuration file paths under the colorschemes subdirectory. They should have the extension .conf. The default color scheme is
read from filetypes.common.
The [named_styles] section and [named_colors] section are the same as for filetypes.common.
The [theme_info] section can contain information about the theme. The name and description keys are read to set the menu item text and tooltip, respectively. These
keys can have translations, e.g.:
key=Hello
key[de]=Hallo
key[fr_FR]=Bonjour
Geany uses its own tags file format, similar to what ctags uses (but is incompatible with ctags). You use Geany to generate global tags files, as described below.
Workspace symbols
Each document is parsed for symbols whenever a file is loaded, saved or modified (see Symbol list update frequency preference in the Editor Completions
preferences). These are shown in the Symbol list in the Sidebar. These symbols are also used for autocompletion and calltips for all documents open in the current
session that have the same filetype.
The Go to Symbol commands can be used with all workspace symbols. See Go to symbol definition.
Global tags files are used to provide symbols for autocompletion and calltips without having to open the source files containing these symbols. This is intended for
library APIs, as the tags file only has to be updated when you upgrade the library.
You can either download these files or generate your own. They have the format:
name.lang_ext.tags
lang_ext is one of the extensions set for the filetype associated with the tags parser. See the section called Filetype extensions for more information.
Some global tags files are distributed with Geany and will be loaded automatically when the corresponding filetype is first used. Currently this includes global
tags files for these languages:
C
Pascal
PHP
HTML -- &symbol; completion, e.g. for ampersand, copyright, etc.
LaTeX
Python
Tagmanager format
Pipe-separated format
CTags format
The first line of global tags files should be a comment, introduced by # followed by a space and a string like format=pipe, format=ctags or format=tagmanager respectively,
these are case-sensitive. This helps Geany to read the file properly. If this line is missing, Geany tries to auto-detect the used format but this might fail.
The Tagmanager format is a bit more complex and is used for files created by the geany -g command. There is one symbol per line. Different symbol attributes like
the return value or the argument list are separated with different characters indicating the type of the following argument. This is the more complete and
recommended tags file format.
Pipe-separated format
The Pipe-separated format is easier to read and write. There is one symbol per line and different symbol attributes are separated by the pipe character ( |). A line
looks like:
Except for the first field (symbol name), all other field can be left empty but the pipe separator must appear for them.
You can easily write your own global tags files using this format. Just save them in your tags directory, as described earlier in the section Global tags files.
CTags format
This is the format that ctags generates, and that is used by Vim. This format is compatible with the format historically used by Vi.
The format is described at http://ctags.sourceforge.net/FORMAT, but for the full list of existing extensions please refer to ctags. However, note that Geany may
actually only honor a subset of the existing extensions.
You can generate your own global tags files by parsing a list of source files. The command is:
Tags File filename should be in the format described earlier -- see the section called Global tags files.
File list is a list of filenames, each with a full path (unless you are generating C/C++ tags files and have set the CFLAGS environment variable appropriately).
-P or --no-preprocessing disables using the C pre-processor to process #include directives for C/C++ source files. Use this option if you want to specify each
source file on the command-line instead of using a 'master' header file. Also can be useful if you don't want to specify the CFLAGS environment variable.
For C/C++ tags files gcc is required by default, so that header files can be preprocessed to include any other headers they depend upon. If you do not want this,
use the -P option described above.
For preprocessing, the environment variable CFLAGS should be set with appropriate -I/path include paths. The following example works with the bash shell,
generating a tags file for the GnomeUI library:
You can adapt this command to use CFLAGS and header files appropriate for whichever libraries you want.
C ignore.tags
You can ignore certain symbols for C-based languages if they would lead to wrong parsing of the code. Use the Tools->Configuration Files->ignore.tags menu item
to open the user ignore.tags file. See also Configuration file paths.
List all symbol names you want to ignore in this file, separated by spaces and/or newlines.
Example:
G_GNUC_NULL_TERMINATED
G_GNUC_PRINTF
G_GNUC_WARN_UNUSED_RESULT
More detailed information about ignore.tags usage from the Exuberant Ctags manual page:
Specifies a list of identifiers which are to be specially handled while parsing C and C++ source files. This option is specifically provided to handle special
cases arising through the use of pre-processor macros. When the identifiers listed are simple identifiers, these identifiers will be ignored during parsing
of the source files. If an identifier is suffixed with a '+' character, ctags will also ignore any parenthesis-enclosed argument list which may immediately
follow the identifier in the source files. If two identifiers are separated with the '=' character, the first identifiers is replaced by the second identifiers for
parsing purposes.
For even more detailed information please read the manual page of Exuberant Ctags.
Geany extends Ctags with a '*' character suffix - this means use prefix matching, e.g. G_GNUC_* will match G_GNUC_NULL_TERMINATED, etc. Note that prefix
match items should be put after other items to ensure that items like G_GNUC_PRINTF+ get parsed correctly.
Preferences
You may adjust Geany's settings using the Edit --> Preferences dialog. Any changes you make there can be applied by hitting either the Apply or the OK button.
These settings will persist between Geany sessions. Note that most settings here have descriptive popup bubble help -- just hover the mouse over the item in
question to get help on it.
You may also adjust some View settings (under the View menu) that persist between Geany sessions. The settings under the Document menu, however, are only
for the current document and revert to defaults when restarting Geany.
Note
In the paragraphs that follow, the text describing a dialog tab comes after the screenshot of that tab.
Startup
Shutdown
Paths
Startup path
Path to start in when opening or saving files. It must be an absolute path.
Project files
Path to start in when opening project files.
Extra plugin path
By default Geany looks in the system installation and the user configuration - see Plugins. In addition the path entered here will be searched. Usually you do
not need to set an additional path to search for plugins. It might be useful when Geany is installed on a multi-user machine and additional plugins are
available in a common location for all users. Leave blank to not set an additional lookup path.
Miscellaneous
Remove all messages from the status bar. The messages are still displayed in the status messages window.
Tip
Another option is to use the Switch to Editor keybinding - it reshows the document statistics on the status bar. See Focus keybindings.
Search
Projects
Interface preferences
Sidebar
Show sidebar
Whether to show the sidebar at all.
Show symbol list
Show the list of functions, variables, and other information in the current document you are editing.
Show documents list
Show all the documents you have open currently. This can be used to change between documents (see Switching between documents) and to perform some
common operations such as saving, closing and reloading.
Position
Whether to place the sidebar on the left or right of the editor window.
Message window
Position
Whether to place the message window on the bottom or right of the editor window.
Fonts
Editor
Change the font used to display documents.
Symbol list
Change the font used for the Symbols sidebar tab.
Message window
Change the font used for the message window area.
Miscellaneous
Editor tabs
Tab positions
Editor
Set the positioning of the editor's notebook tabs to the right, left, top, or bottom of the editing window.
Sidebar
Set the positioning of the sidebar's notebook tabs to the right, left, top, or bottom of the sidebar window.
Message window
Set the positioning of the message window's notebook tabs to the right, left, top, or bottom of the message window.
Toolbar
Show Toolbar
Whether to show the toolbar.
Append Toolbar to the Menu
Allows to append the toolbar to the main menu bar instead of placing it below. This is useful to save vertical space.
Customize Toolbar
See Customizing the toolbar.
Appearance
Icon Style
Select the toolbar icon style to use - either icons and text, just icons or just text. The choice System default uses whatever icon style is set by GTK.
Icon size
Select the size of the icons you see (large, small or very small). The choice System default uses whatever icon size is set by GTK.
Features
Line wrapping
Show long lines wrapped around to new display lines.
Indentation group
Width
The width of a single indent size in spaces. By default the indent size is equivalent to 4 spaces.
Detect width from file
Try to detect and set the indent width based on file content, when a file is opened.
Type
Just Tabs
Just Spaces
Tabs and Spaces, depending on how much indentation is on a line
The Tabs and Spaces indent type is also known as Soft tab support in some other editors.
The type of auto-indentation you wish to use after pressing Enter, if any.
Basic
Just add the indentation of the previous line.
Current chars
Add indentation based on the current filetype and any characters at the end of the line such as {, } for C, : for Python.
Match braces
Like Current chars but for C-like languages, make a closing } brace line up with the matching opening brace.
Tab key indents
If set, pressing tab will indent the current line or selection, and unindent when pressing Shift-tab. Otherwise, the tab key will insert a tab character into the
document (which can be different from indentation, depending on the indent type).
Note
There are also separate configurable keybindings for indent & unindent, but this preference allows the tab key to have different meanings in different
contexts - e.g. for snippet completion.
Completions
Snippet Completion
Whether to replace special keywords after typing Tab into a pre-defined text snippet. See User-definable snippets.
XML/HTML tag auto-closing
When you open an XML/HTML tag automatically generate its completion tag.
Automatic continuation multi-line comments
Continue automatically multi-line comments in languages like C, C++ and Java when a new line is entered inside such a comment. With this option enabled,
Geany will insert a * on every new line inside a multi-line comment, for example when you press return in the following C code:
/*
* This is a C multi-line comment, press <Return>
on the next line with the correct indentation based on the previous line, as long as the multi-line is not closed by */.
Autocomplete symbols
When you start to type a symbol name, look for the full string to allow it to be completed for you.
Autocomplete all words in document
When you start to type a word, Geany will search the whole document for words starting with the typed part to complete it, assuming there are no symbol
names to show.
Drop rest of word on completion
Remove any word part to the right of the cursor when choosing a completion list item.
Characters to type for autocompletion
Number of characters of a word to type before autocompletion is displayed.
Completion list height
The number of rows to display for the autocompletion window.
Max. symbol name suggestions
The maximum number of items in the autocompletion list.
Symbol list update frequency
The minimum delay (in milliseconds) between two symbol list updates.
This option determines how frequently the symbol list is updated for the current document. The smaller the delay, the more up-to-date the symbol list (and
then the completions); but rebuilding the symbol list has a cost in performance, especially with large files.
The default value is 250ms, which means the symbol list will be updated at most four times per second, even if the document changes continuously.
A value of 0 disables automatic updates, so the symbol list will only be updated upon document saving.
Geany can automatically insert a closing bracket and quote characters when you open them. For instance, you type a ( and Geany will automatically insert ). With
the following options, you can define for which characters this should work.
Parenthesis ( )
Auto-close parenthesis when typing an opening one
Curly brackets { }
Auto-close curly brackets (braces) when typing an opening one
Square brackets [ ]
Auto-close square brackets when typing an opening one
Single quotes ' '
Auto-close single quotes when typing an opening one
Double quotes " "
Auto-close double quotes when typing an opening one
Display
The long line marker helps to indicate overly-long lines, or as a hint to the user for when to break the line.
Type
Line
Show a thin vertical line in the editor window at the given column position.
Background
Change the background color of characters after the given column position to the color set below. (This is recommended over the Line setting if you use
proportional fonts).
Disabled
Don't mark long lines at all.
Long line marker
Set this value to a value greater than zero to specify the column where it should appear.
Long line marker color
Set the color of the long line marker.
Virtual spaces
Virtual space is space beyond the end of each line. The cursor may be moved into virtual space but no real space will be added to the document until there is some
text typed or some other text insertion command is used.
Disabled
Do not show virtual spaces
Only for rectangular selections
Only show virtual spaces beyond the end of lines when drawing a rectangular selection
Always
Always show virtual spaces beyond the end of lines
Files preferences
New files
Saving files
Perform formatting operations when a document is saved. These can each be undone with the Undo command.
Note
Replace all tabs in the document with the equivalent number of spaces.
Note
It is better to use spaces to indent than use this preference - see Indentation.
Miscellaneous
The number of seconds to periodically check the current document's file on disk in case it has changed. Setting it to 0 will disable this feature.
Note
These checks are only performed on local files. Remote files are not checked for changes due to performance issues (remote files are files in ~/.gvfs/).
Tools preferences
Tool paths
Terminal
The command to execute a script in a terminal. Occurrences of %c in the command are substituted with the run script name, see Terminal emulators.
Browser
The location of your web browser executable.
Grep
The location of the grep executable.
Note
For Windows users: at the time of writing it is recommended to use the grep.exe from the UnxUtils project (http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils). The grep.exe
from the Mingw project for instance might not work with Geany at the moment.
Commands
Context action
Set this to a command to execute on the current word. You can use the "%s" wildcard to pass the current word below the cursor to the specified command.
Template preferences
This data is used as meta data for various template text to insert into a document, such as the file header. You only need to set fields that you want to use in your
template files.
Template data
Developer
The name of the developer who will be creating files.
Initials
The initials of the developer.
Mail address
Note
Company
The company the developer is working for.
Initial version
The initial version of files you will be creating.
Year
Specify a format for the {year} wildcard. You can use any conversion specifiers which can be used with the ANSI C strftime function. For details please see
http://man.cx/strftime.
Date
Specify a format for the {date} wildcard. You can use any conversion specifiers which can be used with the ANSI C strftime function. For details please see
http://man.cx/strftime.
Date & Time
Specify a format for the {datetime} wildcard. You can use any conversion specifiers which can be used with the ANSI C strftime function. For details please
see http://man.cx/strftime.
Keybinding preferences
There are some commands listed in the keybinding dialog that are not, by default, bound to a key combination, and may not be available as a menu item.
Note
Printing preferences
Various preferences
Rarely used preferences, explained in the table below. A few of them require restart to take effect, and a few other will only affect newly opened or created
documents before restart.
Statusbar Templates
line: %l / %L\t col: %c\t sel: %s\t %w %t %mmode: %M encoding: %e filetype: %f scope: %S
Settings the preference to an empty string will also cause Geany to use this internal default.
The following format characters are available for the statusbar template:
Placeholder Description
%l The current line number starting at 1
%L The total number of lines
%c The current column number starting at 0, including virtual space.
%C The current column number starting at 1, including virtual space.
%s The number of selected characters or if only whole lines selected, the number of selected lines.
%n The number of selected characters, even if only whole lines are selected.
%w Shows RO when the document is in read-only mode, otherwise shows whether the editor is in overtype (OVR) or insert (INS) mode.
%t Shows the indentation mode, either tabs (TAB), spaces (SP) or both (T/S).
%m Shows whether the document is modified (MOD) or nothing.
%M The name of the document's line-endings (ex. Unix (LF))
%e The name of the document's encoding (ex. UTF-8).
%f The filetype of the document (ex. None, Python, C, etc).
%S The name of the scope where the caret is located.
%p The caret position in the entire document starting at 0.
%r Shows whether the document is read-only (RO) or nothing.
%Y The Scintilla style number at the caret position. This is useful if you're debugging color schemes or related code.
Terminal widget
Terminal font
Select the font that will be used in the terminal emulation control.
Foreground color
Select the font color.
Background color
Select the background color of the terminal.
Background image
Select the background image to show behind the terminal's text.
Scrollback lines
The number of lines buffered so that you can scroll though the history.
Shell
The location of the shell on your system.
Scroll on keystroke
Scroll the terminal to the prompt line when pressing a key.
Scroll on output
Scroll the output down.
Cursor blinks
Let the terminal cursor blink.
Project management
Project management is optional in Geany. Currently it can be used for:
A list of session files can be stored and opened with the project when the Use project-based session files preference is enabled, in the Projects group of the
General Miscellaneous preferences tab of the Preferences dialog.
As long as a project is open, the Build menu will use the items defined in project's settings, instead of the defaults. See Build Menu Configuration for information
on configuring the menu.
The current project's settings are saved when it is closed, or when Geany is shutdown. When restarting Geany, the previously opened project file that was in use
at the end of the last session will be reopened.
New project
To create a new project, fill in the Name field. By default this will setup a new project file ~/projects/name.geany. Usually it's best to store all your project files in the
same directory (they are independent of any source directory trees).
The Base path text field is setup to use ~/projects/name. This can safely be set to any existing path -- it will not touch the file structure contained in it.
Project properties
You can set an optional description for the project. Currently it's only used for a template wildcard - see Template wildcards.
The Base path field is used as the directory to run the Build menu commands. The specified path can be an absolute path or it is considered to be relative to the
project's file name.
The File patterns field allows to specify a list of file patterns for the project, which can be used in the Find in files dialog.
The Indentation tab allows you to override the default Indentation settings.
Open project
The Open command displays a standard file chooser, starting in ~/projects. Choose a project file named with the .geany extension.
When project session support is enabled, Geany will close the currently open files and open the session files associated with the project.
Close project
When project session support is enabled, Geany will close the project session files and open any previously closed default session files.
Build menu
After editing code with Geany, the next step is to compile, link, build, interpret, run etc. As Geany supports many languages each with a different approach to such
operations, and as there are also many language independent software building systems, Geany does not have a built-in build system, nor does it limit which
system you can use. Instead the build menu provides a configurable and flexible means of running any external commands to execute your preferred build system.
This section provides a description of the default configuration of the build menu and then covers how to configure it, and where the defaults fit in.
Warnings and errors that can be parsed for line numbers will be shown in red in the Compiler tab and you can click on them to switch to the relevant source file
(or open it) and mark the line number. Also lines with warnings or errors are marked in the source, see Indicators below.
Tip
If Geany's default error message parsing does not parse errors for the tool you're using, you can set a custom regex in the Build Commands Dialog, see Build
Menu Configuration.
Indicators
Indicators are red squiggly underlines which are used to highlight errors which occurred while compiling the current file. So you can easily see where your code
failed to compile. You can remove them by selecting Remove Error Indicators in the Document menu.
If you do not like this feature, you can disable it - see Editor Features preferences.
Depending on the current file's filetype, the default Build menu will contain the following items:
Compile
Build
Lint
Make All
Make Custom Target
Make Object
Next Error
Previous Error
Execute
Set Build Menu Commands
Compile
The Compile command has different uses for different kinds of files.
For compilable languages such as C and C++, the Compile command is set up to compile the current source file into a binary object file.
Interpreted languages such as Perl, Python, Ruby will compile to bytecode if the language supports it, or will run a syntax check, or if that is not available will run
the file in its language interpreter.
Build
For compilable languages such as C and C++, the Build command will link the current source file's equivalent object file into an executable. If the object file does
not exist, the source will be compiled and linked in one step, producing just the executable binary.
Note
If you need complex settings for your build system, or several different settings, then writing a Makefile and using the Make commands is recommended; this will
also make it easier for users to build your software.
Lint
Source code linters are often used to find code that doesn't correspond to certain style guidelines: non-portable code, common or hard to find errors, code
"smells", variables used before being set, unused functions, division by zero, constant conditions, etc. Linters inspect the code and issue warnings much like the
compilers do. This is formally referred to as static code analysis.
Some common linters are pre-configured for you in the Build menu (pep8 for Python, cppcheck for C/C++, JSHint for JavaScript, xmllint for XML, hlint for Haskell,
shellcheck for shell code, ...), but all these are standalone tools you need to obtain before using.
Make
This is similar to running 'Make' but you will be prompted for the make target name to be passed to the Make tool. For example, typing 'clean' in the dialog
prompt will run "make clean".
Make object
Make object will run "make current_file.o" in the same directory as the current file, using the filename for 'current_file'. It is useful for building just the current
file without building the whole project.
Next error
The next error item will move to the next detected error in the file.
Previous error
The previous error item will move to the previous detected error in the file.
Execute
Execute will run the corresponding executable file, shell script or interpreted script in a terminal window. The command set in the "Set Build Commands" dialog is
run in a script to ensure the terminal stays open after execution completes. Note: see Terminal emulators below for the command format. Alternatively the built-in
VTE can be used if it is available - see Virtual terminal emulator widget (VTE).
After your program or script has finished executing, the run script will prompt you to press the return key. This allows you to review any text output from the
program before the terminal window is closed.
Note
When there is a running program, the Execute menu item in the menu and the Run button in the toolbar each become a stop button so you can stop the current
running program (and any child processes). This works by sending the SIGQUIT signal to the process.
Depending on the process you started it is possible that the process cannot be stopped. For example this can happen when the process creates more than one
child process.
Terminal emulators
The Terminal field of the tools preferences tab requires a command to execute the terminal program and to pass it the name of the Geany run script that it should
execute in a Bourne compatible shell (eg /bin/sh). The marker "%c" is substituted with the name of the Geany run script, which is created in the temporary
directory and which changes the working directory to the directory set in the Build commands dialog, see Build menu commands dialog for details.
By default Compile, Build and Execute are fairly basic commands. You may wish to customise them using Set Build Commands.
E.g. for C you can add any include paths and compile flags for the compiler, any library names and paths for the linker, and any arguments you want to use when
running Execute.
The build menu has considerable flexibility and configurability, allowing both menu labels the commands they execute and the directory they execute in to be
configured.
For example, if you change one of the default make commands to run say 'waf' you can also change the label to match.
The build menu is divided into four groups of items each with different behaviors:
Filetype build commands - are configurable and depend on the filetype of the current document; they capture output in the compiler tab and parse it for
errors.
Independent build commands - are configurable and mostly don't depend on the filetype of the current document; they also capture output in the compiler
tab and parse it for errors.
Execute commands - are configurable and intended for executing your program or other long running programs. The output is not parsed for errors and is
directed to the terminal command selected in preferences.
Fixed commands - these perform built-in actions:
Go to the next error.
Go to the previous error.
Show the build menu commands dialog.
The maximum numbers of items in each of the configurable groups can be configured in the Various preferences. Even though the maximum number of items may
have been increased, only those menu items that have values configured are shown in the menu.
The groups of menu items obtain their configuration from four potential sources. The highest priority source that has the menu item defined will be used. The
sources in decreasing priority are:
The detailed relationships between sources and the configurable menu item groups is shown in the following table.
Filetype
Independent Loads From: project file Loads From: geany.conf file in Loads From: filetypes.xxx 1:
~/.config/geany in Geany install Label: _Make Command: make
Saves To: project file 2:
Saves to: as above, creating if Saves to: as user Label: Make Custom _Target
needed. preferences left. Command: make
3:
Label: Make _Object Command: make
%e.o
General - for filetypes.xxx substitute the appropriate extension for the filetype of the current document for xxx - see filenames.
System Filetypes - Labels loaded from these sources are locale sensitive and can contain translations.
(Filetype, Project File) and (Filetype, Preferences) - preferences use a full filetype file so that users can configure all other filetype preferences as well.
Projects can only configure menu items per filetype. Saving in the project file means that there is only one file per project not a whole directory.
(Filetype-Independent, System Filetype) - although conceptually strange, defining filetype-independent commands in a filetype file, this provides the ability to
define filetype dependent default menu items.
(Execute, Project File) and (Execute, Preferences) - the project independent execute and preferences independent execute commands can only be set by hand
editing the appropriate file, see Preferences file format and Project file format.
Most of the configuration of the build menu is done through the Build Menu Commands Dialog. You edit the configuration sourced from preferences in the dialog
opened from the Build->Build Menu Commands item and you edit the configuration from the project in the build tab of the project preferences dialog. Both use
the same form shown below.
The filetype and independent sections also each contain a field for the regular expression used for parsing command output for error and warning messages.
The columns in the first three sections allow setting of the label, command, and working directory to run the command in.
An empty working directory will default to the directory of the current document. If there is no current document then the command will not run.
The dialog will always show the command selected by priority, not just the commands configured in this configuration source. This ensures that you always see
what the menu item is going to do if activated.
If the current source of the menu item is higher priority than the configuration source you are editing then the command will be shown in the dialog but will be
insensitive (greyed out). This can't happen with the project source but can with the preferences source dialog.
The clear buttons remove the definition from the configuration source you are editing. When you do this the command from the next lower priority source will be
shown. To hide lower priority menu items without having anything show in the menu configure with a nothing in the label but at least one character in the
command.
The first occurrence of each of the following character sequences in each of the command and working directory fields is substituted by the items specified below
before the command is run.
Note
If the basepath set in the project preferences is not an absolute path , then it is taken as relative to the directory of the project file. This allows a project file stored
in the source tree to specify all commands and working directories relative to the tree itself, so that the whole tree including the project file, can be moved and
even checked into and out of version control without having to re-configure the build menu.
Keyboard shortcuts can be defined for the first two filetype menu items, the first three independent menu items, the first execute menu item and the fixed menu
items. In the keybindings configuration dialog (see Keybinding preferences) these items are identified by the default labels shown in the Build Menu section
above.
It is currently not possible to bind keyboard shortcuts to more than these menu items.
You can also use underlines in the labels to set mnemonic characters.
Old settings
The configurable Build Menu capability was introduced in Geany 0.19 and required a new section to be added to the configuration files (See Preferences file
format). Geany will still load older format project, preferences and filetype file settings and will attempt to map them into the new configuration format. There is
not a simple clean mapping between the formats. The mapping used produces the most sensible results for the majority of cases. However, if they do not map the
way you want, you may have to manually configure some settings using the Build Commands Dialog or the Build tab of the project preferences dialog.
Any setting configured in either of these dialogs will override settings mapped from older format configuration files.
Printing support
Since Geany 0.13 there has been printing support using GTK's printing API. The printed page(s) will look nearly the same as on your screen in Geany. Additionally,
there are some options to modify the printed page(s).
Note
The background text color is set to white, except for text with a white foreground. This allows dark color schemes to save ink when printing.
You can define whether to print line numbers, page numbers at the bottom of each page and whether to print a page header on each page. This header contains
the filename of the printed document, the current page number and the date and time of printing. By default, the file name of the document with full path
information is added to the header. If you prefer to add only the basename of the file(without any path information) you can set it in the preferences dialog. You
can also adjust the format of the date and time added to the page header. The available conversion specifiers are the same as the ones which can be used with the
ANSI C strftime function.
All of these settings can also be changed in the print dialog just before actual printing is done. On Unix-like systems the provided print dialog offers a print
preview. The preview file is opened with a PDF viewer and by default GTK uses evince for print preview. If you have not installed evince or just want to use another
PDF viewer, you can change the program to use in the file .gtkrc-2.0 (usually found in your home directory). Simply add a line like:
at the end of the file. Of course, you can also use xpdf, kpdf or whatever as the print preview command.
Geany also provides an alternative basic printing support using a custom print command. However, the printed document contains no syntax highlighting. You can
adjust the command to which the filename is passed in the preferences dialog. The default command is:
% lpr %f
%f will be substituted by the filename of the current file. Geany will not show errors from the command itself, so you should make sure that it works before(e.g. by
trying to execute it from the command line).
But this depends on a2ps and xfprint4. As a replacement for xfprint4, gtklp or similar programs can be used.
Plugins
Plugins are loaded at startup, if the Enable plugin support general preference is set. There is also a command-line option, -p, which prevents plugins being loaded.
Plugins are scanned in the following directories:
Most plugins add menu items to the Tools menu when they are loaded.
See also Plugin documentation for information about single plugins which are included in Geany.
Plugin manager
The Plugin Manager dialog lets you choose which plugins should be loaded at startup. You can also load and unload plugins on the fly using this dialog. Once you
click the checkbox for a specific plugin in the dialog, it is loaded or unloaded according to its previous state. By default, no plugins are loaded at startup until you
select some. You can also configure some plugin specific options if the plugin provides any.
Keybindings
Geany supports the default keyboard shortcuts for the Scintilla editing widget. For a list of these commands, see Scintilla keyboard commands. The Scintilla
keyboard shortcuts will be overridden by any custom keybindings with the same keyboard shortcut.
Switching documents
There are some non-configurable bindings to switch between documents, listed below. These can also be overridden by custom keybindings.
Key Action
Alt-[1-9] Select left-most tab, from 1 to 9.
Alt-0 Select right-most tab.
Configurable keybindings
For all actions listed below you can define your own keybindings. Open the Preferences dialog, select the desired action and click on change. In the resulting
dialog you can press the key combination you want to assign to the action and it will be saved when you press OK. You can define only one key combination for
each action and each key combination can only be defined for one action.
The following tables list all customizable keyboard shortcuts, those which are common to many applications are marked with (C) after the shortcut.
File keybindings
Editor keybindings
Clipboard keybindings
Select keybindings
Insert keybindings
Format keybindings
Settings keybindings
Default
Action shortcut Description
Preferences Ctrl-Alt-P Opens preferences dialog.
Plugin Preferences Opens plugin preferences dialog.
Search keybindings
Note
The keybindings marked "see note below" work like this: if no text is selected, the word under cursor is used, and it has to match fully (like when Match only a
whole word is enabled in the Search dialog). However if some text is selected, then it is matched regardless of word boundaries.
Go to keybindings
View keybindings
Focus keybindings
Document keybindings
Project keybindings
Default
Action shortcut Description
New Create a new project.
Open Opens a project file.
Properties Shows project properties.
Close Close the current project.
Build keybindings
Tools keybindings
Default
Action shortcut Description
Show Color Chooser Opens the Color Chooser dialog.
Help keybindings
Default
Action shortcut Description
Help F1 (C) Opens the manual.
Configuration files
Warning
You must use UTF-8 encoding without BOM for configuration files.
The system files should not normally be edited because they will be overwritten when upgrading Geany.
The user configuration directory can be overridden with the -c switch, but this is not normally done. See Command line options.
Note
Any missing subdirectories in the user configuration directory will be created when Geany starts.
You can check the paths Geany is using with Help->Debug Messages. Near the top there should be 2 lines with something like:
The system path is $prefix/share/geany, where $prefix is the path where Geany is installed (see Installation prefix).
Paths on Windows
The system path is the data subfolder of the installation path on Windows.
The user configuration directory might vary, but on Windows XP it's: C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\geany On Windows 7 and above you most likely
will find it at: C:\users\UserName\Roaming\geany
Note
Other configuration files not shown here will need to be opened manually, and will not be automatically reloaded when saved. (see Reload Configuration below).
There's also a Reload Configuration item which can be used if you updated one of the other configuration files, or modified or added template files.
Note
Syntax highlighting colors aren't updated in open documents after saving filetypes.common as this may take a significant amount of time.
The global configuration file is read from geany.conf in the system configuration path - see Configuration file paths. It can contain any settings which are found in
the usual configuration file created by Geany, but does not have to contain all settings.
Note
This feature is mainly intended for package maintainers or system admins who want to set up Geany in a multi user environment and set some sane default values
for this environment. Usually users won't need to do that.
Filenames
Each filetype has a corresponding filetype definition file. The format for built-in filetype Foo is:
filetypes.foo
Filetype Extension
C++ cpp
C# cs
Make makefile
Matlab/Octave matlab
filetypes.Foo.conf
System files
The system-wide filetype configuration files can be found in the system configuration path and are called filetypes.$ext, where $ext is the name of the filetype. For
every filetype there is a corresponding definition file. There is one exception: filetypes.common -- this file is for general settings, which are not specific to a certain
filetype.
Warning
It is not recommended that users edit the system-wide files, because they will be overridden when Geany is updated.
User files
To change the settings, copy a file from the system configuration path to the subdirectory filedefs in your user configuration directory. Then you can edit the file
and the changes will still be available after an update of Geany.
Alternatively, you can create the file yourself and add only the settings you want to change. All missing settings will be read from the corresponding system
configuration file.
Custom filetypes
At startup Geany looks for filetypes.*.conf files in the system and user filetype paths, adding any filetypes found with the name matching the ' *' wildcard - e.g.
filetypes.Bar.conf.
Custom filetypes are not as powerful as built-in filetypes, but support for the following has been implemented:
Recognizing and setting the filetype (after the user has manually updated the filetype extensions file).
Filetype group membership.
Reading filetype settings in the [settings] section, including:
Using an existing syntax highlighting lexer (lexer_filetype key).
Using an existing tags parser (tag_parser key).
Build commands ([build-menu] section).
Loading global tags files (sharing the tag_parser filetype's namespace).
Because most filetype settings will relate to the syntax highlighting (e.g. styling, keywords, lexer_properties sections), it is best to copy an existing filetype file that
uses the lexer you wish to use as the basis of a custom filetype, using the correct filename extension format shown above, e.g.:
cp filetypes.foo filetypes.Bar.conf
Then add the lexer_filetype=Foo setting (if not already present) and add/adjust other settings.
Warning
The [styling] and [keywords] sections have key names specific to each filetype/lexer. You must follow the same names - in particular, some lexers only support one
keyword list, or none.
Filetype configuration
As well as the sections listed below, each filetype file can contain a [build-menu] section as described in [build-menu] section.
[styling] section
In this section the colors for syntax highlighting are defined. The manual format is:
key=foreground_color;background_color;bold_flag;italic_flag
Colors have to be specified as RGB hex values prefixed by 0x or # similar to HTML/CSS hex triplets. For example, all of the following are valid values for pure red;
0xff0000, 0xf00, #ff0000, or #f00. The values are case-insensitive but it is a good idea to use lower-case. Note that you can also use named colors as well by
substituting the color value with the name of a color as defined in the [named_colors] section, see the [named_colors] Section for more information.
Bold and italic are flags and should only be "true" or "false". If their value is something other than "true" or "false", "false" is assumed.
You can omit fields to use the values from the style named "default".
E.g. key=0xff0000;;true
This makes the key style have red foreground text, default background color text and bold emphasis.
The second format uses a named style name to reference a style defined in filetypes.common.
key=named_style
key2=named_style2,bold,italic
The bold and italic parts are optional, and if present are used to toggle the bold or italic flags to the opposite of the named style's flags. In contrast to style
definition booleans, they are a literal ",bold,italic" and commas are used instead of semi-colons.
E.g. key=comment,italic
This makes the key style match the "comment" named style, but with italic emphasis.
You can automatically copy all of the styles from another filetype definition file by using the following syntax for the [styling] group:
[styling=Foo]
Where Foo is a filetype name. The corresponding [styling] section from filetypes.foo will be read.
This is useful when the same lexer is being used for multiple filetypes (e.g. C/C++/C#/Java/etc). For example, to make the C++ styling the same as the C styling,
you would put the following in filetypes.cpp:
[styling=C]
[keywords] section
This section contains keys for different keyword lists specific to the filetype. Some filetypes do not support keywords, so adding a new key will not work. You can
only add or remove keywords to/from an existing list.
Important
The keywords list must be in one line without line ending characters.
[lexer_properties] section
Here any special properties for the Scintilla lexer can be set in the format key.name.field=some.value.
Properties Geany uses are listed in the system filetype files. To find other properties you need Geany's source code:
[settings] section
extension
This is the default file extension used when saving files, not including the period character ( .). The extension used should match one of the patterns
associated with that filetype (see Filetype extensions).
Example: extension=cxx
wordchars
These characters define word boundaries when making selections and searching using word matching options.
Note
This overrides the wordchars filetypes.common setting, and has precedence over the whitespace_chars setting.
comment_single
A character or string which is used to comment code. If you want to use multiline comments only, don't set this but rather comment_open and
comment_close.
Single-line comments are used in priority over multiline comments to comment a line, e.g. with the Comment/Uncomment line command.
Example: comment_single=//
comment_open
A character or string which is used to comment code. You need to also set comment_close to really use multiline comments. If you want to use single-line
comments, prefer setting comment_single.
Multiline comments are used in priority over single-line comments to comment a block, e.g. template comments.
Example: comment_open=/*
comment_close
If multiline comments are used, this is the character or string to close the comment.
Example: comment_close=*/
comment_use_indent
Set this to false if a comment character or string should start at column 0 of a line. If set to true it uses any indentation of the line.
#command_example();
# command_example();
Note: This setting only works for single line comments (like '//', '#' or ';').
Example: comment_use_indent=true
context_action_cmd
A command which can be executed on the current word or the current selection.
Example usage: Open the API documentation for the current function call at the cursor position.
The command can be set for every filetype or if not set, a global command will be used. The command itself can be specified without the full path, then it is
searched in $PATH. But for security reasons, it is recommended to specify the full path to the command. The wildcard %s will be replaced by the current
word at the cursor position or by the current selection.
Hint: for PHP files the following could be quite useful: context_action_cmd=firefox "http://www.php.net/%s"
tag_parser
The TagManager language name, e.g. "C". Usually the same as the filetype name.
lexer_filetype
A filetype name to setup syntax highlighting from another filetype. This must not be recursive, i.e. it should be a filetype name that doesn't use the
lexer_filetype key itself, e.g.:
lexer_filetype=C
#lexer_filetype=C++
The second line is wrong, because filetypes.cpp itself uses lexer_filetype=C, which would be recursive.
symbol_list_sort_mode
Value Meaning
0 Sort symbols by name
1 Sort symbols by appearance (line number)
xml_indent_tags
If this setting is set to true, a new line after a line ending with an unclosed XML/HTML tag will be automatically indented. This only applies to filetypes for
which the HTML or XML lexer is used. Such filetypes have this setting in their system configuration files.
mime_type
The MIME type for this file type, e.g. "text/x-csrc". This is used for example to chose the icon to display for this file type.
[indentation] section
This section allows definition of default indentation settings specific to the file type, overriding the ones configured in the preferences. This can be useful for file
types requiring specific indentation settings (e.g. tabs only for Makefile). These settings don't override auto-detection if activated.
width
The forced indentation width.
type
[build_settings] section
As of Geany 0.19 this section is supplemented by the [build-menu] section. Values that are set in the [build-menu] section will override those in this section.
error_regex
This is a Perl-compatible regular expression (PCRE) to parse a filename (absolute or relative) and line number from the build output. If undefined, Geany will
fall back to its default error message parsing.
Only the first two match groups will be read by Geany. These groups can occur in any order: the match group consisting of only digits will be used as the line
number, and the other group as the filename. In no group consists of only digits, the match will fail.
Example: error_regex=^(.+):([0-9]+):[0-9]+
This will parse a message such as: test.py:7:24: E202 whitespace before ']'
Build commands
If any build menu item settings have been configured in the Build Menu Commands dialog or the Build tab of the project preferences dialog then these settings
are stored in the [build-menu] section and override the settings in this section for that item.
compiler
This item specifies the command to compile source code files. But it is also possible to use it with interpreted languages like Perl or Python. With these
filetypes you can use this option as a kind of syntax parser, which sends output to the compiler message window.
You should quote the filename to also support filenames with spaces. The following wildcards for filenames are available:
linker
This item specifies the command to link the file. If the file is not already compiled, it will be compiled while linking. The -o option is automatically added by
Geany. This item works well with GNU gcc, but may be problematic with other compilers (esp. with the linker).
run_cmd
Use this item to execute your file. It has to have been built already. Use the %e wildcard to have only the name of the executable (i.e. without extension) or
use the %f wildcard if you need the complete filename, e.g. for shell scripts.
Example: run_cmd="./%e"
There is a special filetype definition file called filetypes.common. This file defines some general non-filetype-specific settings.
You can open the user filetypes.common with the Tools->Configuration Files->filetypes.common menu item. This adds the default settings to the user file if the file
doesn't exist. Alternatively the file can be created manually, adding only the settings you want to change. All missing settings will be read from the system file.
Note
[named_styles] section
Named styles declared here can be used in the [styling] section of any filetypes.* file.
For example:
In filetypes.common:
[named_styles]
foo=0xc00000;0xffffff;false;true
bar=foo
In filetypes.c:
[styling]
comment=foo
This saves copying and pasting the whole style definition into several different files.
Note
You can define aliases for named styles, as shown with the bar entry in the above example, but they must be declared after the original style.
[named_colors] section
Named colors declared here can be used in the [styling] or [named_styles] section of any filetypes.* file or color scheme.
For example:
[named_colors]
my_red_color=#FF0000
my_blue_color=#0000FF
[named_styles]
foo=my_red_color;my_blue_color;false;true
This allows to define a color palette by name so that to change a color scheme-wide only involves changing the hex value in a single location.
[styling] section
default
This is the default style. It is used for styling files without a filetype set.
Example: default=0x000000;0xffffff;false;false
selection
Foreground color
Background color
Use foreground color
Use background color
The colors are only set if the 3rd or 4th argument is true. When the colors are not overridden, the default is a dark grey background with syntax highlighted
foreground text.
Example: selection=0xc0c0c0;0x00007F;true;true
brace_good
The style for brace highlighting when a matching brace was found.
Example: brace_good=0xff0000;0xFFFFFF;true;false
brace_bad
The style for brace highlighting when no matching brace was found.
Example: brace_bad=0x0000ff;0xFFFFFF;true;false
caret
The style for coloring the caret(the blinking cursor). Only first and third argument is interpreted. Set the third argument to true to change the caret into a
block caret.
Example: caret=0x000000;0x0;false;false
caret_width
The width for the caret(the blinking cursor). Only the first argument is interpreted. The width is specified in pixels with a maximum of three pixel. Use the
width 0 to make the caret invisible.
Example: caret_width=3
current_line
The style for coloring the background of the current line. Only the second and third arguments are interpreted. The second argument is the background
color. Use the third argument to enable or disable background highlighting for the current line (has to be true/false).
Example: current_line=0x0;0xe5e5e5;true;false
indent_guide
The style for coloring the indentation guides. Only the first and second arguments are interpreted.
Example: indent_guide=0xc0c0c0;0xffffff;false;false
white_space
The style for coloring the white space if it is shown. The first both arguments define the foreground and background colors, the third argument sets whether
to use the defined foreground color or to use the color defined by each filetype for the white space. The fourth argument defines whether to use the
background color.
Example: white_space=0xc0c0c0;0xffffff;true;true
margin_linenumber
Line number margin foreground and background colors.
margin_folding
Fold margin foreground and background colors.
fold_symbol_highlight
Highlight color of folding symbols.
folding_style
The style of folding icons. Only first and second arguments are used.
1 -- for boxes
2 -- for circles
3 -- for arrows
4 -- for +/-
0 -- for no lines
1 -- for straight lines
2 -- for curved lines
Default: folding_style=1;1;
Arrows: folding_style=3;0;
folding_horiz_line
Draw a thin horizontal line at the line where text is folded. Only first argument is used.
Example: folding_horiz_line=0;0;false;false
line_wrap_visuals
First argument: drawing of visual flags to indicate a line is wrapped. This is a bitmask of the values:
0 -- No visual flags
1 -- Visual flag at end of subline of a wrapped line
2 -- Visual flag at begin of subline of a wrapped line. Subline is indented by at least 1 to make room for the flag.
Second argument: wether the visual flags to indicate a line is wrapped are drawn near the border or near the text. This is a bitmask of the values:
Example: line_wrap_visuals=3;0;false;false
line_wrap_indent
First argument: sets the size of indentation of sublines for wrapped lines in terms of the width of a space, only used when the second argument is 0.
Second argument: wrapped sublines can be indented to the position of their first subline or one more indent level. Possible values:
0 - Wrapped sublines aligned to left of window plus amount set by the first argument
1 - Wrapped sublines are aligned to first subline indent (use the same indentation)
2 - Wrapped sublines are aligned to first subline indent plus one more level of indentation
Example: line_wrap_indent=0;1;false;false
translucency
Translucency for the current line (first argument) and the selection (second argument). Values between 0 and 256 are accepted.
Note for Windows 95, 98 and ME users: keep this value at 256 to disable translucency otherwise Geany might crash.
Example: translucency=256;256;false;false
marker_line
The style for a highlighted line (e.g when using Goto line or goto symbol). The foreground color (first argument) is only used when the Markers margin is
enabled (see View menu).
Example: marker_line=0x000000;0xffff00;false;false
marker_search
The style for a marked search results (when using "Mark" in Search dialogs). The second argument sets the background color for the drawn rectangle.
Example: marker_search=0x000000;0xb8f4b8;false;false
marker_mark
The style for a marked line (e.g when using the "Toggle Marker" keybinding (Ctrl-M)). The foreground color (first argument) is only used when the Markers
margin is enabled (see View menu).
Example: marker_mark=0x000000;0xb8f4b8;false;false
marker_translucency
Translucency for the line marker (first argument) and the search marker (second argument). Values between 0 and 256 are accepted.
Note for Windows 95, 98 and ME users: keep this value at 256 to disable translucency otherwise Geany might crash.
Example: marker_translucency=256;256;false;false
line_height
Amount of space to be drawn above and below the line's baseline. The first argument defines the amount of space to be drawn above the line, the second
argument defines the amount of space to be drawn below.
Example: line_height=0;0;false;false
calltips
The style for coloring the calltips. The first two arguments define the foreground and background colors, the third and fourth arguments set whether to use
the defined colors.
Example: calltips=0xc0c0c0;0xffffff;false;false
indicator_error
Example: indicator_error=0xff0000
[settings] section
whitespace_chars
Characters to treat as whitespace. These characters are ignored when moving, selecting and deleting across word boundaries (see Scintilla keyboard
commands).
Example: whitespace_chars=\s\t!\"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^`{|}~
wordchars
These characters define word boundaries when making selections and searching using word matching options.
Example: wordchars=_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789
Note
Filetype extensions
Note
To change the default filetype extension used when saving a new file, see Filetype definition files.
You can override the list of file extensions that Geany uses to detect filetypes using the user filetype_extensions.conf file. Use the Tools->Configuration
Files->filetype_extensions.conf menu item. See also Configuration file paths.
You should only list lines for filetype extensions that you want to override in the user configuration file and remove or comment out others. The patterns are listed
after the = sign, using a semi-colon separated list of patterns which should be matched for that filetype.
For example, to override the filetype extensions for Make, the file should look like:
[Extensions]
Make=Makefile*;*.mk;Buildfile;
Group membership is also stored in filetype_extensions.conf. This file is used to store information Geany needs at startup, whereas the separate filetype definition
files hold information only needed when a document with their filetype is used.
[Groups]
Programming=C;C++;
Script=Perl;Python;
Markup=HTML;XML;
Misc=Diff;Conf;
None=None;
Note
[build-menu] section
The [build-menu] section contains the configuration of the build menu. This section can occur in filetype, preferences and project files and always has the format
described here. Different menu items are loaded from different files, see the table in the Build Menu Configuration section for details. All the settings can be
configured from the dialogs except the execute command in filetype files and filetype definitions in the project file, so these are the only ones which need hand
editing.
The build-menu section stores one entry for each setting for each menu item that is configured. The keys for these settings have the format:
GG_NN_FF
where:
[build-menu] additions
The project file also can have extra fields in the [build-menu] section in addition to those listed in [build-menu] section above.
When filetype menu items are configured for the project they are stored in the project file.
The filetypes entry is a list of the filetypes which exist in the project file.
For each filetype the entries for that filetype have the format defined in [build-menu] section but the key is prefixed by the name of the filetype as it appears in the
filetypes entry, eg the entry for the label of filetype menu item 0 for the C filetype would be
CFT_00_LB=Label
Templates
Geany supports the following templates:
ChangeLog entry
File header
Function description
Short GPL notice
Short BSD notice
File templates
To use these templates, just open the Edit menu or open the popup menu by right-clicking in the editor widget, and choose "Insert Comments" and insert
templates as you want.
Some templates (like File header or ChangeLog entry) will always be inserted at the top of the file.
To insert a function description, the cursor must be inside of the function, so that the function name can be determined automatically. The description will be
positioned correctly one line above the function, just check it out. If the cursor is not inside of a function or the function name cannot be determined, the inserted
function description won't contain the correct function name but "unknown" instead.
Note
Geany automatically reloads template information when it notices you save a file in the user's template configuration directory. You can also force this by selecting
Tools->Reload Configuration.
Meta data can be used with all templates, but by default user set meta data is only used for the ChangeLog and File header templates.
In the configuration dialog you can find a tab "Templates" (see Template preferences). You can define the default values which will be inserted in the templates.
File templates
File templates are templates used as the basis of a new file. To use them, choose the New (with Template) menu item from the File menu.
By default, file templates are installed for some filetypes. Custom file templates can be added by creating the appropriate template file. You can also edit the
default file templates.
The file's contents are just the text to place in the document, with optional template wildcards like {fileheader}. The fileheader wildcard can be placed anywhere,
but it's usually put on the first line of the file, followed by a blank line.
File templates are read from templates/files under the Configuration file paths.
The filetype to use is detected from the template file's extension, if any. For example, creating a file module.c would add a menu item which created a new document
with the filetype set to 'C'.
The template file is read from disk when the corresponding menu item is clicked.
Customizing templates
Each template can be customized to your needs. The templates are stored in the ~/.config/geany/templates/ directory (see the section called Command line options
for further information about the configuration directory). Just open the desired template with an editor (ideally, Geany ;-) ) and edit the template to your needs.
There are some wildcards which will be automatically replaced by Geany at startup.
Template wildcards
Global wildcards
The format for these wildcards can be changed in the preferences dialog, see Template preferences. You can use any conversion specifiers which can be used with
the ANSI C strftime function. For details please see http://man.cx/strftime.
Dynamic wildcards
The {command:} wildcard is a special one because it can execute a specified command and put the command's output (stdout) into the template.
Example:
{command:uname -a}
Linux localhost 2.6.9-023stab046.2-smp #1 SMP Mon Dec 10 15:04:55 MSK 2007 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Using this wildcard you can insert nearly any arbitrary text into the template.
In the environment of the executed command the variables GEANY_FILENAME, GEANY_FILETYPE and GEANY_FUNCNAME are set. The value of these variables is filled in only if
Geany knows about it. For example, GEANY_FUNCNAME is only filled within the function description template. However, these variables are always set, just maybe with an
empty value. You can easily access them e.g. within an executed shell script using:
$GEANY_FILENAME
Note
If the specified command could not be found or not executed, the wildcard is substituted by an empty string. In such cases, you can find the occurred error
message on Geany's standard error and in the Help->Debug Messages dialog.
The toolbar editor can be opened from the preferences editor on the Toolbar tab or by right-clicking on the toolbar itself and choosing it from the menu.
To override the system-wide configuration file, copy it to your user configuration directory (see Configuration file paths).
For example:
% cp /usr/local/share/geany/ui_toolbar.xml /home/username/.config/geany/
Then edit it and add any of the available elements listed in the file or remove any of the existing elements. Of course, you can also reorder the elements as you
wish and add or remove additional separators. This file must be valid XML, otherwise the global toolbar UI definition will be used instead.
Note
1. You cannot add new actions which are not listed below.
2. Everything you add or change must be inside the /ui/toolbar/ path.
Plugin documentation
HTML Characters
The HTML Characters plugin helps when working with special characters in XML/HTML, e.g. German Umlauts ü and ä.
When the plugin is enabled, you can insert special character entities using Tools->Insert Special HTML Characters.
This opens up a dialog where you can find a huge amount of special characters sorted by category that you might like to use inside your document. You can
expand and collapse the categories by clicking on the little arrow on the left hand side. Once you have found the desired character click on it and choose "Insert".
This will insert the entity for the character at the current cursor position. You might also like to double click the chosen entity instead.
To help make a XML/HTML document valid the plugin supports replacement of special chars known by the plugin. Both bulk replacement and immediate
replacement during typing are supported.
At typing time
You can activate/deactivate this feature using the Tools->HTML Replacement->Auto-replace Special Characters menu item. If it's activated, all special characters
(beside the given exceptions from above) known by the plugin will be replaced by their entities.
You could also set a keybinding for the plugin to toggle the status of this feature.
Bulk replacement
After inserting a huge amount of text, e.g. by using copy & paste, the plugin allows bulk replacement of all known characters (beside the mentioned exceptions).
You can find the function under the same menu at Tools->HTML Replacement->Replace Characters in Selection, or configure a keybinding for the plugin.
Save Actions
Auto Save
This plugin provides an option to automatically save documents. You can choose to save the current document, or all of your documents, at a given delay.
You can save the current document when the editor's focus goes out. Every pop-up, menu dialogs, or anything else that can make the editor lose the focus, will
make the current document to be saved.
Instant Save
This plugin sets on every new file (File->New or File->New (with template)) a randomly chosen filename and set its filetype appropriate to the used template or
when no template was used, to a configurable default filetype. This enables you to quickly compile, build and/or run the new file without the need to give it an
explicit filename using the Save As dialog. This might be useful when you often create new files just for testing some code or something similar.
Backup Copy
This plugin creates a backup copy of the current file in Geany when it is saved. You can specify the directory where the backup copy is saved and you can
configure the automatically added extension in the configure dialog in Geany's plugin manager.
After the plugin was loaded in Geany's plugin manager, every file is copied into the configured backup directory after the file has been saved in Geany.
The created backup copy file permissions are set to read-write only for the user. This should help to not create world-readable files on possibly unsecure
destination directories like /tmp (especially useful on multi-user systems). This applies only to non-Windows systems. On Windows, no explicit file permissions are
set.
Additionally, you can define how many levels of the original file's directory structure should be replicated in the backup copy path. For example, setting the option
Directory levels to include in the backup destination to 2 cause the plugin to create the last two components of the original file's path in the backup copy path and
place the new file there.
This document (geany.txt) is written in reStructuredText (or "reST"). The source file for it is located in Geany's doc subdirectory. If you intend on making changes,
you should grab the source right from Git to make sure you've got the newest version. First, you need to configure the build system to generate the HTML
documentation passing the --enable-html-docs option to the configure script. Then after editing the file, run make (from the root build directory or from the doc
subdirectory) to build the HTML documentation and see how your changes look. This regenerates the geany.html file inside the doc subdirectory. To generate a PDF
file, configure with --enable-pdf-docs and run make as for the HTML version. The generated PDF file is named geany-1.32.pdf and is located inside the doc
subdirectory.
After you are happy with your changes, create a patch e.g. by using:
or even better, by creating a Git-formatted patch which will keep authoring and description data, by first committing your changes (doing so in a fresh new branch
is recommended for master not to diverge from upstream) and then using git format-patch:
and then submit that file to the mailing list for review.
Also you can clone the Geany repository at GitHub and send a pull request.
Note, you will need the Python docutils software package installed to build the docs. The package is named python-docutils on Debian and Fedora systems.
This appendix is distributed under the terms of the License for Scintilla and SciTE. A copy of this license can be found in the file scintilla/License.txt included with
the source code of this program and in the appendix of this document. See License for Scintilla and SciTE.
20 June 2006
Keyboard commands
Keyboard commands for Scintilla mostly follow common Windows and GTK+ conventions. All move keys (arrows, page up/down, home and end) allows to extend
or reduce the stream selection when holding the Shift key, and the rectangular selection when holding the appropriate keys (see Column mode editing
(rectangular selections)).
Some keys may not be available with some national keyboards or because they are taken by the system such as by a window manager or GTK. Keyboard
equivalents of menu commands are listed in the menus. Some less common commands with no menu equivalent are:
Editor
Alt-scroll wheel moves up/down a page.
Ctrl-scroll wheel zooms in/out.
Shift-scroll wheel scrolls 8 characters right/left.
Ctrl-click on a word in a document to perform Go to Symbol Definition.
Interface
Double-click on a symbol-list group to expand or compact it.
GTK-related
Scrolling the mouse wheel over a notebook tab bar will switch notebook pages.
The following are derived from X-Windows features (but GTK still supports them on Windows):
Compile-time options
There are some options which can only be changed at compile time, and some options which are used as the default for configurable options. To change these
options, edit the appropriate source file in the src subdirectory. Look for a block of lines starting with #define GEANY_*. Any definitions which are not listed here
should not be changed.
Note
src/geany.h
project.h
filetypes.c
editor.h
keyfile.c
These are default settings that can be overridden in the Preferences dialog.
cmd.exe /Q /C %c
build.c
Preamble
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your
freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public
License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free
software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. This
General Public License applies to most of the Free Software
Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to
using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by
the GNU Library General Public License instead.) You can apply it to
your programs, too.
We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and
(2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy,
distribute and/or modify the software.
Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain
that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free
software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we
want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so
that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original
authors' reputations.
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and
you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion
of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and
distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1
above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
parties under the terms of this License.
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of
Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for
making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source
code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any
associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to
control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a
special exception, the source code distributed need not include
anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary
form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the
operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component
itself accompanies the executable.
this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such
parties remain in full compliance.
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not
signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or
distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are
prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by
modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the
Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and
all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying
the Program or works based on it.
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the
Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the
original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to
these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further
restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to
this License.
9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions
of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will
be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to
address new problems or concerns.
10. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free
programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author
to ask for permission. For software which is copyrighted by the Free
Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes
make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals
of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and
of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.
NO WARRANTY
<one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.>
Copyright (C) <year> <name of author>
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.
Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.
The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the appropriate
parts of the General Public License. Of course, the commands you use may
be called something other than `show w' and `show c'; they could even be
mouse-clicks or menu items--whatever suits your program.
You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your
school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if
necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:
This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into
proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may
consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the
library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General
Public License instead of this License.
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation.
NEIL HODGSON DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE, INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND
FITNESS, IN NO EVENT SHALL NEIL HODGSON BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES
WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION,
ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
View document source. Generated on: 2017-11-19 10:47 UTC. Generated by Docutils from reStructuredText source.