Autotools based build system

The Autotools based build system is very mature and has been well tested. To use it, you just need the Make tool, preferably GNU Make.

Then run the following commands:

$ ./configure
$ make

Then as root:

% make install

Waf based build system

The Waf build system is still quite young and under heavy development but already in a usable state. In contrast to the Autotools system, Waf needs Python. So before using Waf, you need to install Python on your system. The advantage of the Waf build system over the Autotools based build system is that the whole build process might be a bit faster. Especially when you use the Waf cache feature for repetitive builds (e.g. when changing only a few source files to test something) will become much faster since Waf will cache and re-use the unchanged built files and only compile the changed code again. See Waf Cache for details. To build Geany with Waf as run:

$ ./waf configure
$ ./waf build

Then as root:

% ./waf install

$ mkdir -p ~/.cache/waf

export WAFCACHE=/home/username/.cache/waf

$ find /home/username/.cache/waf -mtime +14 -exec rm {} \;

Custom installation

The configure script supports several common options, for a detailed list, type:

$ ./configure --help

or::

$ ./waf --help

(depending on which build system you use).

You may also want to read the INSTALL file for advanced installation options.

• See also Compile-time options.

Dynamic linking loader support and VTE

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.

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). If you specify some files on the command line, only these files will be opened, but you can find the files from the last session 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.

You can start several instances of Geany, but only the first will load files from the last session. 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.

Opening files from the command-line in a running instance

Geany detects if there is an 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.

Virtual terminal emulator widget (VTE)

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.

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.

Defining own widget styles using .gtkrc-2.0

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:

widget "Geany*" style "geanyStyle"

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

An example of a simple .gtkrc-2.0:

style "geanyStyle"
{
    font_name="Sans 12"
}
widget "GeanyMainWindow" style "geanyStyle"

style "geanyStyle"
{
    font_name="Sans 10"
}
widget "GeanyPrefsDialog" style "geanyStyle"

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. Its is not alphabetical as shown in the documents list (regardless of whether or not editor tabs are visible).

The tabs can be positioned at the top, bottom, left, or right of the main editing window, by a selection in the interface preferences.

See the Notebook tab keybindings section for useful shortcuts including for Most-Recently-Used document switching.

Using character sets

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.

There are different ways to set different encodings in Geany:

• Using the file open dialog

  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).

• Using the "Reload as" menu item

  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.

• Using the "Set encoding" menu item

  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.

• Specifying the encoding in the file itself

  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.

In-file encoding specification

Geany detects meta tags of HTML files which contain charset information like:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-15" />

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 ]*

Some examples are:

# encoding = ISO-8859-15

or:

# coding: ISO-8859-15

Special encoding "None"

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.

Unicode Byte-Order-Mark (BOM)

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.

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.

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.

Column mode editing (rectangular selections)

There is basic support for column mode editing. To use it, create a rectangular selection by holding down the Control and Shift keys (or Control and Alt if it doesn't work) while selecting some text. It is also possible to create a zero-column selection. 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.

Drag and drop of text

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 or multiple spaces. The default indent mode is set in the Editor Features preferences (see the link for more information). But this can be overridden using either the Document->Indent Type menu, or by using the Detect from file indentation preference. When enabled, this scans each file that is opened and sets the indent mode based on how many lines start with a tab vs. 2 or more spaces.

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.

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.

Geany has four types of auto-indentation:

None

Disables auto-indentation completely.

Basic

Adds the same amount of whitespace on a new line as on the last line.

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.

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.

Code navigation history

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 tag declaration
• Go to tag 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.

Sending text through custom commands

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, just go to the Set Custom Commands dialog in the Format sub menu of the Edit and Popup menu. Then click on Add to get a new text entry and type the command. You can also specify some command line options. To delete a command, just clear the text entry and press OK. It will be deleted automatically.

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 Format). 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 and for all words in a document.

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.

struct
{
    int i;
    char c;
} foo;

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.

The system-wide configuration file can be found in $prefix/share/geany, where $prefix is the path where Geany is installed (see Installation prefix). It is not recommended to edit the system-wide file, because it will be overridden when Geany is updated.

To change the settings, copy the file from $prefix/share/geany in your configuration directory (usually ~/.config/geany/).

For example:

% cp /usr/local/share/geany/snippets.conf /home/username/.config/geany/

Then you can edit the file and the changes will remain available after an update of Geany because the file resides in your configuration directory. Alternatively, you can create a file ~/.config/geany/snippets.conf and add only these settings you want to change. All missing settings will be read from the global snippets file in $prefix/share/geany.

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:

Substitution Sequences for snippets

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.

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.

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.

Inserting Unicode characters

With GTK 2.10 and above, 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).

For GTK < 2.10, it is also possible, but typing the first Ctrl-Shift-u is not necessary. One problem is that you may find the alphabetic keys conflict with other Geany keybindings.

Toolbar entries

There are also two 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.

Find

The Find dialog is used for finding text in one or more open documents.

style "search_style"
{
    font_name="Monospace 8"
}
widget "GeanyDialogSearch.*.GtkEntry" style:highest "search_style"

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.

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.

The Encoding combo box 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.

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.

Go to tag definition

If the current word is the name of a tag definition (like a function body) and the file containing the tag 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.

Go to tag declaration

Like Go to tag definition, but for a forward declaration such as a function prototype or extern declaration instead of a function body.

Go to line

Go to a particular line number in the current file.

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 POSIX compatible, as described in the table below.

In a regular expression, the following characters are interpreted:

[]|-]    matches these 3 chars
[]-|]    matches from ] to | chars
[a-z]    any lowercase alpha
[^]-]    any char except - and ]
[^A-Z]   any char except uppercase alpha
[a-zA-Z] any alpha

Workspace tags

Tags for each document are parsed whenever a file is loaded or saved. These are shown in the Symbol list in the Sidebar. These tags are also used for autocompletion of symbols and calltips for all documents open in the current session that have the same filetype.

The Go to Tag commands can be used with all workspace tags. See Go to tag definition.

Global tags

Global tags are used to provide autocompletion of symbols and calltips without having to open the corresponding source files. This is intended for library APIs, as the tags file only has to be updated when you upgrade the library.

You can load a custom global tags file in two ways:

• Using the Load Tags command in the Tools menu.
• By creating a directory ~/.config/geany/tags, and moving or symlinking the tags files there before starting Geany.
• By creating a directory $prefix/share/geany/tags, and moving or symlinking the tags files there before starting Geany. $prefix is the installation prefix (see Installation prefix).

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. See the section called Filetype extensions for more information.

basename|string|(string path [, string suffix])|

geany -g [-P] <Tag File> <File list>

geany -g wxd.d.tags /home/username/wxd/wx/*.d

CFLAGS=`pkg-config --cflags libgnomeui-2.0` geany -g gnomeui.c.tags \
/usr/include/libgnomeui-2.0/gnome.h

Ignore tags

You can also ignore certain tags if they would lead to wrong parsing of the code. Simply create a file called "ignore.tags" in your Geany configuration directory (usually ~/.config/geany/). Then list all tags you want to ignore in this file, separated by spaces and/or newlines.

More detailed information about the 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.

General Startup preferences

General Miscellaneous preferences

Interface preferences

Toolbar preferences

Affects the main toolbar underneath the menu bar.

Editor Features preferences

Editor Indentation preferences

Editor Completions preferences

Editor Display preferences

This is for visual elements displayed in the editor window.

Files preferences

Tools preferences

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.

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.

Printing preferences

Use external command for printing

Use a system command to print your file out.

Use native GTK printing

Let the GTK GUI toolkit handle your print request.

Print line numbers

Print the line numbers on the left of your paper.

Print page number

Print the page number on the bottom right of your paper.

Print page header

Print a header on every page that is sent to the printer.

Use base name of the printed file

Don't use the entire path for the header, only the filename.

Date format

How the date should be printed. You can use the same format specifiers as in the ANSI C function strftime(). For details please see http://man.cx/strftime.

Terminal (VTE) preferences

See also: Virtual terminal emulator widget (VTE).

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, but it is not used elsewhere by Geany.

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.

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

Project file settings are saved when the project is closed.

When project session support is enabled, Geany will close the project session files and open any previously closed default session files.

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.

Default Build Menu Items

Depending on the current file's filetype, the default Build menu will contain the following items:

• Compile
• Build
• Make All
• Make Custom Target
• Make Object
• Next Error
• Previous Error
• Execute
• Set Build Menu Commands

Build Menu Configuration

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.

These settings are saved automatically when Geany is shut down.

The build menu is divided into four groups of items each with different behaviors:

• File items - are configurable and depend on the filetype of the current document; they capture output in the compiler tab and parse it for errors.

• Non-file items - 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 items - 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 selected in preferences.

• Fixed items - 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 when Geany starts using hidden settings (see Preferences File Format). 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:

• A project file if open
• The user preferences
• The system filetype definitions
• The defaults

The detailed relationships between sources and the configurable menu item groups is shown in the following table.

The following notes on the table reference cells by coordinate as (group,source):

• General - for filetype.xxx substitute the filetype name of the current document for xxx.
• 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.
• (Non-Filetype, System Filetype) - although conceptually strange, defining non-filetype commands in a filetype file, this provides the ability to define filetype dependent default menu items.
• (Execute, Project File) and (Execute, Preferences) - the project filetype based execute configuration and preferences non-filetype based execute can only be set by hand editing the appropriate file, see Preferences File Format and Project File Format.

Build Menu Commands Dialog

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 dialog is divided into three sections:

• Filetype menu items which will be selected based on the filetype of the currently open document.
• Non-filetype menu items.
• Execute menu items.

The filetype and non-filetype 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 item with an empty label will not be shown in the menu.

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.

Switching documents

There are a few non-configurable bindings to switch between documents, listed below. These can also be overridden by custom keybindings.

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.

Some of the default key combinations are common across many applications, for example Ctrl-N for New and Ctrl-O for Open. Because they are so common it is not advisable to change these, but you can add other key combinations for these actions. For example Ctrl-O is set to execute menu_open by default, but you can also define Alt-O, so that the file open dialog is shown by pressing either Ctrl-O or Alt-O.

The following tables list all customizable keyboard shortcuts, those which are common to many applications are marked with (C) after the shortcut.

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.

Custom filetypes are not as powerful as built-in filetypes, but the following have been implemented:

• Recognizing and setting the filetype (after the user has manually edited filetype_extensions.conf).

• Filetype settings in the [settings] section (see Format).

  • Using existing tag parsing (tag_parser key).
  • Using existing syntax highlighting (lexer_filetype key).

• Build commands.

• Loading global tags files (namespace will be shared with tag_parser type).

System files

The system-wide configuration files can be found in $prefix/share/geany and are called filetypes.$ext, where $prefix is the path where Geany is installed (see Installation prefix) and $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.

User files

To change the settings, copy a file from $prefix/share/geany to the subdirectory filedefs in your configuration directory (usually ~/.config/geany/).

For example:

% cp /usr/local/share/geany/filetypes.c /home/username/.config/geany/filedefs/

Then you can edit the file and the changes are also available after an update of Geany because they reside in your configuration directory. Alternatively, you can create a file ~/.config/geany/filedefs/filetypes.X and add only these settings you want to change. All missing settings will be read from the corresponding global definition file in $prefix/share/geany.

As well as the sections listed below, each filetype file can contain a [build-menu] section as described in [build-menu] Section.

Format

Special file filetypes.common

There is a special filetype definition file called filetypes.common. This file defines some general non-filetype-specific settings.

See the Format section for how to define styles.

[named_styles]
foo=0xc00000;0xffffff;false;true
bar=foo

[styling]
comment=foo

Hidden preferences

There are some rarely used preferences that are not shown in the Preferences dialog. These can be set by editing the preferences file, then selecting Tools->Reload Configuration or restarting Geany. Search for the key name, then edit the value. Example:

brace_match_ltgt=true

The table below show the key names of hidden preferences in the configuration file.

[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:

• GG - is the menu item group,
  • FT for filetype
  • NF for non-filetype
  • EX for execute
• NN - is a two decimal digit number of the item within the group, starting at 00
• FF - is the field,
  • LB for label
  • CM for command
  • WD for working directory

[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

Template meta data

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. You should select Tools->Reload Configuration or restart Geany after making changes.

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 and then selecting Tools->Reload Configuration or restarting Geany. 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.

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.

{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

$GEANY_FILENAME

Manually editing of the toolbar layout

To override the system-wide configuration file, copy it from $prefix/share/geany to your configuration directory, usually ~/.config/geany/. $prefix is the path where Geany is installed (see Installation prefix).

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.

Your changes are applied once you save the file.

Available toolbar elements

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 when the file is saved in Geany.