Geany's Almost Magical Text-Editing Capabilities

If you are looking for a superior text editor, your search might just begin and end with a nifty program called "Geany."

One of my biggest concerns when I switched from Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows to Linux was finding an adequate replacement for my favorite text editor. For years, I used a commercial program called "TextPad," but it was a Windows-only product, so my search began.
I had no problem switching my word processor preference from Microsoft Word to Open Office.org's package. That provided a nearly identical suite of programs for word processing, spreadsheets and PowerPoint-type presentations.

However, much of the writing I do does not require a full-fledged word processing program. I use the OpenOffice Writer for printed versions of my work, but the right text editor can provide a more convenient writing platform for personal notes and posting assignments with editors via the Internet.


To be perfectly accurate, Geany is not a text editor per se. It was actually developed by its project contributors to provide a small and fast integrated development environment (IDE) with a dependency on only a few libraries so it would run on any Linux distribution without a lot of technical hand-holding.

As an IDE, Geany is a software application that provides comprehensive tools for programmers for software development. It is open source; its code is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.