GEANY(1)

✨ GEANY ✨

okay bestie, gather round, because today we're talking about Geany — a small and lightweight IDE 💖

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🌸 NAME 🌸

Geany — a small and lightweight IDE. that's it, that's the whole vibe. small. lightweight. iconic. 👑

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

geany [option]  [+number]  [files ...]

like, that's the whole invocation. options, maybe a +number, and then some files. slay.

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So Geany is a small and fast editor that also has the basic features of an integrated development environment. she's not doing the most, but she IS doing a lot. 💅

Some of her features, because you're gonna ask:

• syntax highlighting ✨
• code completion
• code folding
• symbol/tag lists
• and so many supported filetypes like C(++), Java, PHP, HTML, DocBook, Perl and more 🫶

Homepage: https://www.geany.org/ — go say hi, she's lovely.

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💖 OPTIONS 💖

okay here's the menu, no skips, we're going through ALL of them because that's what besties do 🍓

• files ... — a space-separated list of filenames. absolute and relative filenames both work, no cap. AND the fun part: Geany also recognises line and column information when you append it to the filename with colons. so like geany foo.bar:10:5 will open the file foo.bar and place the cursor in line 10 at column 5. literally magic. 🪄

Also, projects can be opened — BUT a project file (*.geany) must be the first non-option argument. and if you do that, all the additionally given files are ignored. so don't bother adding extras, she's not reading them. 💀

• +number — sets the initial line number for the first opened file (same as --line, and yes, do not put a space between the + sign and the number). E.g. geany +7 foo.bar will open the file foo.bar and place the cursor in line 7. 🎯
• --column — sets the initial column number for the first opened file (super useful in conjunction with --line, they're a duo fr fr).
• -c, --config — use an alternate configuration directory. the default configuration directory is ~/.config/geany/ and that's where geany.conf and some template files live. 🏠
• --ft-names — prints a list of Geany's internal filetype names (useful for snippets configuration, iykyk).
• -g, --generate-tags — generate a global tags file (see documentation).
• -P, --no-preprocessing — don't preprocess C/C++ files when generating tags.
• -i, --new-instance — don't open files in a running instance, force opening a new instance. only available if Geany was compiled with support for Sockets.
• -l, --line — set the initial line number for the first opened file.
• --list-documents — returns a list of open documents in a running Geany instance. this is the one you use to read the currently opened documents in Geany from an external script or tool. the returned list is separated by newlines (LF) and consists of the full, UTF-8 encoded filenames of the documents. only available if Geany was compiled with support for Sockets.
• -m, --no-msgwin — don't show the message window. use this option if you don't need compiler messages or VTE support. 🙈
• -n, --no-ctags — don't load symbol completion and call tip data. use this option if you don't want to use them. for more information please see documentation.
• -p, --no-plugins — don't load plugin support.
• --print-prefix — prints the installation prefix, the data directory, the lib directory and the locale directory (in this order) to stdout, each per line. this is mainly intended for plugin authors to detect installation paths. 🧚
• -r, --read-only — open all files given on the command line in read-only mode. this only applies to files opened explicitly from the command line, so files from previous sessions or project files are unaffected.
• -s, --no-session — don't load the previous session's files.
• -t, --no-terminal — don't load terminal support. use this option if you don't want to load the virtual terminal emulator widget at startup. if you don't have libvte.so.4 installed, then terminal-support is automatically disabled. only available if Geany was compiled with support for VTE.
• --socket-file — use this socket filename for communication with a running Geany instance.
• --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 doesn't work. only available if Geany was compiled with support for VTE.
• -v, --verbose — be verbose (print useful status messages). she's telling you everything, bestie 🗣️
• -V, --version — show version information and exit.
• -?, --help — show help information and exit.

psst — Geany supports all generic GTK options too, and a list of those is available on the help screen. 💜

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

This manual page was written by the Geany developer team. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2. 🫶

The complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in /usr/share/geany/GPL-2.

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and that's the whole page, bestie 💅 this was geany 2.1, dated July 06, 2025 — go open some files, you're gonna ate. 🌈⭐🎀