It's a REALLY good software for a lightweight dev environment. You need to be a more experienced user than a typical "IDE" audience (or rather, more patience to learn and build your flow) but it's a good editor.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
30 points (96.9% liked)
Programming
21556 readers
232 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Sounds perfect for me! I tend to do a lot of lightweight web stuff so I will definitely be giving it a go shortly! Love Kate but I am always curious to try out new editors. Appreciate the recommendation!
I use it, it's fine for stuff you'd use notepad for. For coding I use a full IDE tho.
Appreciate the recommendation! I will definitely give it a go!
If you ever used notepad++ on windows, it's sort of like that. Uses the same engine, but has different features.
Geany is excellent. It's a lightweight programmer's editor with enough features and configurable hooks to provide the important parts of a full-blown IDE. It renders text clearly, never feels laggy, and doesn't get greedy with your RAM. I recommend it to people who can't stand the bloat that's often seen elsewhere these days, but would rather have a GUI than resort to vim.
A couple minor annoyances to me:
- It doesn't yet support the Language Server Protocol, so any language that it doesn't understand will be left without syntax and context-sensitive features. (On the other hand, it does support a lot of languages.)
- It inherits Scintilla's use of Gtk for its GUI, so it's an alien app on Qt-based desktops.
I use it anyway, because I find it easier / more comfortable to use than Kate.