Featherweb Blog

Geany 1.38 changes the game

Geany 1.38 was released October last year and I discovered it last week...Have I been sleeping all those months? No, so let me explain. My operating system is MX-linux, a very popular and stable Debian based distro. ( It has been number one in the Distrowatch popularity ranking for 4 years now continuously). In Linux, especially in Debian and derivates, stability often comes at a price: not being offered the latest cutting edge version of software. Only after a long testing phase, a new program version is allowed to become part of the "stable" release. So, in my case, Geany was never updated to the latest version.

But then, last week I read about the improvements in Geany 1.38. Several of the complaints I had were now solved! I wanted it, and I wanted it now.
Thanks to Appimage I was able to run Geany 1.38 without any problems. These are my early impressions:

• Overall speed improved, very snappy
• Startup speed noticibly improved
• No slowing down startup with a dozen documents open
• Auto-save strongly improved. Before I got it down to 5 seconds after each change. Lower than that Geany became unstable. Now it works perfectly with a 1 second saving time... Very nice!

For the moment I use Firefox as the html preview engine, replacing Epiphany. I could not get the (unofficial?) Geany webkit-preview to work. Could be caused by my lack of patience...

As I wrote recently, I am "in the market" for a new editor. To my own surprise, Geany is now one of the top candidates, with this lovely 1.38 edition. Thank You Geany team!