]> Enrico Troeger

&author_mail;

Nick Treleaven

nick.treleaven@btinternet.com

Frank Lanitz

frank@frank.uvena.de

2005-2006 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 in the appendix of this document.

&app; 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, so &app; only requires the GTK2 toolkit and therefore you only need the GTK2 runtime libraries installed to run it. The basic features of &app; are: Syntax highlighting Code completion Auto completion of often used constructs like if, for and while Auto completion of XML and HTML tags Call tips Many supported filetypes like C, Java, PHP, HTML, Python, Perl, Pascal Tag/Symbol lists

This documentation is available in various formats like HTML, text and PDF. The latest version is always available at &appurl;.

You can obtain &app; from &appurl; or perhaps from your distributor.

&app; 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 appendix of this document.

For compiling &app; yourself, you will need the GTK (>= 2.6.0) libraries and header files. You will also need the Pango, Glib and ATK libraries and header files. All these files are available at http://www.gtk.org. Furthermore you need, of course, a C compiler and the Make tool; a C++ compiler is also required for the included Scintilla library. The GNU versions of these tools are recommended.

Compiling &app; is quite easy. The following should do it: % ./configure % make % make install The configure script supports several common options, for a detailed list, type % ./configure --help 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 &app; with dynamic linking loader support to automatically load libvte.so.4 if available. &app; has been successfully compiled and tested under Debian 3.1 Sarge, Debian 3.2 Etch, Fedora Core 4, LinuxFromScratch and FreeBSD 6.0. It also compiles under Microsoft Windows, but there are lots of changes to the makefiles necessary. If there are any errors during compilation, check your build environment and try to find the error, otherwise contact the author at &author_mail;.

You can use the Fedora Core 4 repository from http://naturidentisch.de/packages/fc4/.

Binary packages for Debian are available at &deburl;/. You can add one of the following lines(depending on your system) to your apt sources.list to automatically get the latest version of &app;: deb &deburl;/ ./stable/ deb &deburl;/ ./testing/

Packages for SuSE are not yet available.

An ebuild for Gentoo can be found on http://www.gentoo.de.

You can start &app; in the following ways: From the Desktop Environment menu Choose in your application menu of your used Desktop Environment: Development &app; . From the command line To start &app; from a command line, type the following and press Return: % &app_small;

Short option Long option Function -n --no-ctags Do not load auto completion and call tip data. Use this option if you do not want to use them. For more information see . -m --no-msgwin Do not show the message window. Use this option if you do not need compiler messages or VTE support. -p --no-pipe Do not open files in a running instance, force opening a new instance. -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. -l --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 autodetection does not work. -c directory_name --config=directory_name Use an alternate configuration directory. Default configuration directory is ~/.&app_small;/ and there resides &app_small;.conf and other configuration files. -d --debug Run &app; in debug mode, which means being verbose and printing lots of information. -? --help Show help information and exit. -v --version Show version information and exit. [files ...] Open all given files at startup. This option causes &app; to ignore loading stored files from the last session (if enabled). &app; supports all generic GTK options, a list is available on the help screen.

At startup, &app; loads the first 15 files from the last time &app; was launched. You can disable this feature in the preferences dialog(see ). 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. This contains the last 15 recently opened files. It may be that &app; loads not exactly 15 session files, this depends on the compile time option GEANY_SESSION_FILES; the default is 15. For details see .

&app; detects an already running instance of itself and opens new files in the already running one. So, you can use &app; like an editor to view and edit files by opening them from other programs. If you do not like this for some reason, you can disable it with the appropriate command line option. In the case that &app; crashed, you will get a message dialog at the next start, which asks you whether to delete an existing named pipe. If you are sure that there is no other instance of &app; is running, you can say Yes and &app; will start as usual. Otherwise click No and Geany will not start.

If a C file (with extension .c, .cpp, .h, etc.) is opened, a global tags file is loaded once, which contains many function declarations from glibc and some other libraries, like X, Bonobo, Gnome, GTK, Glib and so on. These declarations are used for call tips and auto completion. These tags are only useful if you are writing C or C++ source code, so if you know that you do not need these things, you can skip loading this tag file. To do so, start &app; with the argument "-n" or "--no-ctags", for more information see .

If you have installed libvte.so in your system, it is loaded automatically by &app;, and you will have a terminal widget in the notebook at the bottom. If &app; cannot find 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 &app;. Additionally, you can disable the use of the terminal widget by command line option, for more information see . You can use this terminal (from now on called VTE) nearly as an usual 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). &app; tries to load libvte.so. If this fails, it tries to load libvte.so.4. If this fails too, you should check whether you installed libvte correctly. Again, &app; also runs without this library. It could be, that the library is called something else than libvte.so.4 (e.g. on FreeBSD 6.0 it is called libvte.so.8). So please set a link to the correct file (as root). # ln -s /usr/lib/libvte.so.X /usr/lib/libvte.so.4 Obviously, you have to adjust the paths and set X to the number of your libvte.so.

You can use regular expressions in the search dialog, just by activating the check box (see the image below). Detailed information about special characters can be found in the .

In a regular expression, the following characters are interpreted: . Matches any character. \( This marks the start of a region for tagging a match. \) This marks the end of a tagged region. \n Where n is 1 through 9 refers to the first through ninth tagged region when replacing. For example, if the search string was Fred\([1-9]\)XXX and the replace string was Sam\1YYY, when applied to Fred2XXX this would generate Sam2YYY. \< This matches the start of a word. \> This matches the end of a word. \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. [...] This indicates a set of characters, for example, [abc] means any of the characters a, b or c. You can also use ranges, for example [a-z] for any lower case character. [^...] The complement of the characters in the set. For example, [^A-Za-z] means any character except an alphabetic character. $ 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.

should be written

For more information see .

There are some options which can only be changed at compile time. To change these options, edit the file src/geany.h. Look for a block of lines starting with #define GEANY_*. Any definitions which are not listed here should not be changed. Option Description Default GEANY_MAX_OPEN_FILES The limit to how many files can be open at the same time. 25 GEANY_SESSION_FILES How many files should be reopened from the last run. Obviously, the value should be smaller than GEANY_MAX_OPEN_FILES. 15 GEANY_WORDCHARS These characters define word boundaries. (look at sourcecode) GEANY_MAX_AUTOCOMPLETE_WORDS How many auto completion suggestions should &app; provide. 30 GEANY_STRING_UNTITLED A string used as the default name for new files. Be aware that the string can be translated, so change it only if you know what you are doing. untitled GEANY_CHECK_FILE_DELAY Time in seconds between checking a file for external changes. 30 GEANY_WINDOW_MINIMAL_WIDTH The minimal width of the main window. 620 GEANY_WINDOW_MINIMAL_HEIGHT The minimal height of the main window. 440 GEANY_WINDOW_DEFAULT_WIDTH The default width of the main window at the first start. 900 GEANY_WINDOW_DEFAULT_HEIGHT The default height of the main window at the first start. 600

For all listed actions you can define your own keybindings. Open the preferences dialog, select the desired action and click on change. In the opening dialog you can press any key combination you want and it will be saved when you press OK. You can define only one key combination for one action. Some of the default key combinations cannot be changed, e.g. menu_new or menu_open. These are set by GTK and should be kept, but you can still add other key combinations for these actions. For example to execute menu_open by default CtrlO is set, but you can also define AltO, so that the file open dialog is shown by pressing either CtrlO or AltO. The following table lists all available actions for keyboard shortcuts. Action Description Menu items menu_new Creates a new file. menu_open Opens a file. menu_save Saves the current file. menu_saveall Saves all open files. menu_closeall Closes all open files. menu_reloadfile Reloads the current file. All unsaved changes will be lost. menu_undo Undoes the last action. menu_redo Redoes the last action. menu_preferences Opens preferences dialog. menu_findnext Finds next result. menu_findprevious Finds previous result. menu_replace Opens the replace dialog. menu_gotoline Opens the Go To Line dialog. menu_opencolorchooser Opens the colour chooser dialog. menu_fullscreen Switches to fullscreen mode. menu_messagewindow Toggles the message window (status and compiler messages) on and off. menu_zoomin Zooms in the text menu_zoomout Zooms out the text menu_replacetabs Replaces all tabs with the right amount of spaces. menu_foldall Folds all contractible code blocks. menu_unfoldall Unfolds all contracted code blocks. Build options build_compile Compiles the current file. build_link Builds (compiles if necessary and links) the current file. build_make Builds the current file with the Make tool. build_makeowntarget Builds the current file with the Make tool and a given target. build_run Executes the current file in a terminal emulation. build_run2 Executes the current file in a terminal emulation. build_options Opens the build options dialog. Miscellaneous reloadtaglist Reloads the tag/symbol list. switch_editor Switches to editor widget. switch_scribble Switches to scribble widget. switch_vte Switches to VTE widget. switch_tableft Switches to the previous open document. switch_tabright Switches to the next open document. toggle_sidebar Shows or hides the sidebar. Editing operations edit_duplicateline Duplicates the current line. edit_commentline Comments current line or selection. edit_autocomplete Shows auto completion list. edit_calltip Shows call tips for the current function or method. edit_macrolist Shows a list of available macros and variables in the workspace. edit_suppresscompletion If you type something like if or for and press this key, it will not be auto completed.

should be written

&app; supports several templates for file headers, multiline comments (frame comments), function descriptions, a typical ChangeLog entry and a short GPL notice. 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, you cannot insert a function description. Each template can be customized to your needs. The templates are in the configuration directory, which is in ~/.&app_small;/ (see for further information about the configuration directory). Just open the desired template with an editor (ideally &app; ;-) ) and edit the template as your needs. There are some wildcards which will be automatically replaced by &app; at startup. All wildcards must be enclosed by "{" and "}", e.g. {date}. In the configuration dialog you can find a tab "Templates" (see ). You can define the default values which will be inserted in the templates. You should restart &app; after making changes, because they are only read at startup. Since &app; 0.3 there are also templates for creating new files. They can be found in ~/.&app_small;/, too. All template files for creating new files begin with template.filetype. followed by the filetype. At creating a new file with a filetype template, the template for the fileheader is automatically prepended. Please note that the complete behaviour is still under development and will probably be changed in one of the next releases. Sorry.   Wildcard Description Available in following templates developer The name of the developer. filetypes, file header, function description, ChangeLog entry initial The developer's initials, e.g. "ET" for Enrico Troeger or "JFD" for John Foobar Doe. filetypes, file header, function description, ChangeLog entry mail The email address of the developer. file header, function description, ChangeLog entry company The company the developer is working for. filetypes, file header, function description, ChangeLog entry year The current year in the format: YYYY filetypes, file header, function description, ChangeLog entry version The initial version of a new file. filetypes, file header, function description, ChangeLog entry date The current date in the format: YYYY-MM-DD filetypes, file header, function description, ChangeLog entry untitled The string "untitled" (this will be translated to your locale), used in filetype templates filetypes, file header, function description, ChangeLog entry geanyversion The actual Geany version, e.g. "&app; &appversion;" filetypes, file header, function description, ChangeLog entry datetime The current date and time in the format: DD.MM.YYYY HH:mm:ss ZZZZ file header, function description filename The filename of the current file. Only available for the file header template. file header gpl This wildcard inserts a short GPL notice. file header functionname The function name of the function at the cursor position. This wildcard will only be replaced in the function description template. function description If you need any other wildcards or a special date/time format, please email the author &author_mail;.

Since &app; 0.7, most of the keybindings are definable in the preferences dialog. See .

&legal;