Geany 2.1 has officially launched, marking a significant upgrade to this lightweight, GTK-based open-source Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This release comes nearly 20 months after Geany 2.0 and introduces a range of enhancements including an improved user interface and expanded file type support.
One of the most exciting additions in Geany 2.1 is the capability to search through the Messages and Compiler outputs. It also supports modern platform-native file selection dialogs and allows users to group file types by alphabet, enhancing organizational ease. Additionally, new filtering options for the document sidebar and keybindings preferences have been incorporated.
The update enriches the IDE’s versatility by adding support for numerous new file types, such as CIL, Dart, Dockerfile, LESS, SCSS, Nix, Prolog, Raku (Perl 6), SystemVerilog, Terraform HCL, TOML, and Zig, while also improving support for existing types like R and Pascal, along with keywords in Fortran, Java, JavaScript, PowerShell, and Verilog.
Further improvements include symbol support for Ocaml, Meson, and Forth file types. Developers will find enhancements to PHP/HTML/JavaScript symbols handling, better support for triple-quoted strings in Java, refined Shell highlighting, improved Erlang symbol definitions, and better comment support for Groovy code.
Geany is now capable of recognizing various file extensions, ensuring proper syntax highlighting and functionality. Some notable improvements also include a simplified user experience when wrapping search confirmations are shown, adjustments to the handling of encoding settings, and a move towards more streamlined editor features.
In this iteration, the text editor has been optimized to allow functionalities like pasting and autocompletion for multiple carets while also updating its underlying libraries to their latest versions. This update also enhances overall compatibility with external files by automatically focusing the editor window when accessing files externally.
Other features include the SaveActions plugin supporting persistent untitled documents, as well as updates to the FileBrowser plugin, which now employs xdg-open as the default method to open external files on Linux environments. The release also addresses corner-case encoding issues.
For those wanting to explore the full changelog, it is available on the project’s GitHub page. Geany 2.1 can be downloaded as a source tarball or installed as a Flatpak app from Flathub, or it may be available through various software repositories on different Linux distributions.