In this article, I am going to introduce you a very powerful though very less popular IDE Geany. Thos who works on Linux platform, must be knowing Geany very well. But the good news is, it is also available for Windows platform.

Download from here

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 from other packages. Another goal was to be as independent as possible from a special Desktop Environment like KDE or GNOME – Geany only requires the GTK2 runtime libraries.

Some basic features of Geany:

• Syntax highlighting
• Code folding
• Symbol name auto-completion
• Construct completion/snippets
• Auto-closing of XML and HTML tags
• Call tips
• Many supported filetypes including C, Java, PHP, HTML, Python, Perl, Pascal (full list)
• Symbol lists
• Code navigation
• Build system to compile and execute your code
• Simple project management
• Plugin interface (see Plugins)

Geany is known to run under Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, MacOS X, AIX v5.3, Solaris Express and Windows. More generally, it should run on every platform, which is supported by the GTK libraries.

The most powerful features of all these are Plugins & Snippets library.

Plugins that I use are : File Browser, HTML Characters
You can find it from “Tools > Plugin Manager” option in Main menu.

Regarding Snippets, you can apply any code snippet to a short keyword & insert it into file using hotkey “Tab” immediately. Code snippets can be defined in a separate file called snippets.conf
You can find it from “Tools > Configuration Files > snippets.conf” option in Main menu.
E.g. in the end of the snippets.conf file code, insert following line

table=<table>nt<thead>ntt<tr>nttt<th>%cursor%</th>ntt</tr>nt</thead>nt<tbody>ntt<tr>nttt<td></td>ntt</tr>nt</tbody>n</table>

Save the file & restart Geany editor. Now in new file, type “table” & immediately press Tab key. The whole Html table code will be inserted there.

See this video that demonstrates it :
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xCGqOt4C4I

Here is one nice packed snippets.conf file created specially for php web developers & designers. Download it, open it in Geany & replace the code with the original snippets.conf file.

You can find some more Interesting Stuff from here.