Geany - A fast and lightweight IDE
----------------------------------


About
-----
Geany 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 it
is using only the GTK+ toolkit and therefore you need only the
GTK+ runtime libraries to run Geany.


Features
--------
The basic features of Geany 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
- folding
- many supported filetypes like C, Java, PHP, HTML, Python, Perl, Pascal
- symbol lists
- embedded terminal emulation
- extensibility through plugins


Installation from distribution packages
---------------------------------------
Using distribution packages on Linux, BSD and similar distributions
is the easiest and recommended way. This way you will also benefit
from automatic Geany updates by the package manager of the distribution.

Packages are available for most distributions including Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu
and many more.


Installation on Mac OS and Windows
----------------------------------
Prebuilt binary packages for Mac OS and Windows can be found on
https://www.geany.org.


Installation from sources
-------------------------

Requirements
++++++++++++
For compiling Geany yourself, you will need the GTK3 libraries and
header files. You will also need its dependency libraries and header
files, such as Pango, Glib and ATK. All these files are available at
https://www.gtk.org.

Furthermore you need, of course, a C compiler and the Make tool; a C++
compiler is also needed for the required Scintilla library included. The
GNU versions of these tools are recommended.


To build the user manual you need *rst2html* from Docutils. A pre-built
version of the manual is available in distribution tarballs and will be used as
fallback if *rst2html* is missing. When building from Git however, that
pre-built version is not included and *rst2html* is required by default.
You can explicitly disable building the user manual using the
``--disable-html-docs`` *configure* flag, but this will result in not
installing a local version of the user manual, and Geany will then try
and open the online version instead when requested.


.. note::
    Building Geany from source on Mac OS and Windows is more complicated
    and is out of scope of this document. For more information on
    building instructions for these platforms, please check the wiki
    at https://wiki.geany.org/howtos/.

Installing from a Git clone
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Install Autotools (*automake*, *autoconf* and *libtool*), *intltool*,
and the GLib development files **before** running any of the following
commands, as well as *rst2html* from Docutils (see above for details).
Then, run ``./autogen.sh`` and then follow the instructions for
`installing from a release tarball`_.

Installing from a release tarball
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Run the the following three commands::

    $ ./configure
    $ make
    (as root, or using sudo)
    % make install

For more configuration details run ``./configure --help``.

If there are any errors during compilation, check your build environment
and try to find the error, otherwise contact the mailing list or one of
the authors.

See the manual for details (geany.txt/geany.html).


Usage
-----
To run Geany just type::

    $ geany

on a console or use the applications menu from your desktop environment.
For command line options, see the manual page of Geany or run::

    $ geany --help

for details. Or look into the documentation in the *doc/* directory.
The most important option probably is ``-c`` or ``--config``, where you can
specify an alternate configuration directory.


License
-------
Geany 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.
The included Scintilla library (found in the subdirectory scintilla/)
has its own license, which can be found in the file scintilla/License.txt
included with the source code of this program.


Ideas, questions, patches and bug reports
-----------------------------------------
See https://www.geany.org/.
If you add something, or fix a bug, please create a pull request at
https://github.com/geany/geany/. Also see the HACKING file.

Quick Guide for new translations
--------------------------------

If you would like to translate Geany into another language, have a look at the
language statistics page at [1] first to see if your desired language already
exists. If it already exists, please read the "Notes for updating translations"
section. Otherwise, get the Git version of Geany, change to the po directory and
start the new translation with:

$ msginit -l ll_CC -o ll.po -i geany.pot

Fill in ll with the language code and CC with the country code. For example, to
translate Geany into Italian you would type:

$ msginit -l it_IT -o it.po -i geany.pot

This will create a file it.po. This file can be opened with a text editor
(e.g. Geany ;-)) or a graphical program like PoEdit [2]. There are also several
other GUI programs for working on translations.

You don't need to modify the file po/LINGUAS, it is regenerated automatically on
the next build.

When you have finished editing the file, check the file with:

$ msgfmt -c --check-accelerators=_ it.po

Please ensure you also translate the mnemonic letters (strings containing a
"_" before a letter, also called "accelerators" on some platforms/toolkits).
When the user wishes to activate a menu item using their keyboard, they will
use this letter to pick an item from the menu.

Here are a few notes on picking which letter to use:

* Always follow platform/toolkit conventions (for example "t" for "Cut") even
if they don't necessarily seem obvious.
* Try to choose the first letter of the command name, where this is the most
appropriate letter (for example "S" for "Save"), assuming it's not already
used in the same menu.
* Try not to use the same character more than once in the same menu as this
will cause the user to have to press the mnemonic's key multiple times to
select the correct menu item.
* If there is no letter in the text that can easily be entered from a keyboard
then choose another character that can be, and put it in parenthesis after the
translated text.
* Try not to change which letter is used whenever possible as it is not
user-configurable and users may have become accustomed to using the existing
mnemonic key.

You can also use intl_stats.sh, e.g. by running the following command in the top
source directory of Geany:

$ po/intl_stats.sh -a it

This will print some information about the Italian translation and checks for
menu accelerators.

When you have finished your work - which doesn't mean you finished the
translation, you will not have to work alone - send the file to the translation
mailing list [3] or directly to Frank Lanitz [4] and he will add the translation
to Geany then.

It is a good idea to let any translator and Frank know before you start or while
translating, because they can give you hints on translating and Frank can ensure
that a translation is not already in progress.


Notes for updating translations
-------------------------------

If you want to update an existing translation, please contact the translation
mailing list [3] and/or Frank Lanitz [4] directly. He is supervising all
translation issues and will contact the maintainer of the translation you want
to update to avoid any conflicts.

Some translation statistics can be found at:
http://i18n.geany.org/


I18n mailing list
-----------------

There is also a mailing list dedicated to translation issues. Please visit
https://www.geany.org/Support/MailingList#geany-i18 for more information.


[1] http://i18n.geany.org/
[2] http://www.poedit.net/
[3] https://www.geany.org/Support/MailingList#geany-i18
[4] Frank Lanitz <frank(at)frank(dot)uvena(dot)de>

Notes for package maintainers
-----------------------------


About this file
---------------
The following notes are intended for package maintainers. These are not
meant as strict rules but only as hints and ideas to make a package
maintainer's life a little bit easier.
So it doesn't make much sense to include this file in any created
packages for general distribution.


Packaging hints
---------------
If the final file size of the created packaged is a problem, you might
ignore some files and don't package them or put them into a separate
package. This can be easily done (without any further complications)
with the translations files(files in %prefix/share/locale/).
Another possibility is to skip the tags files in the data/ subdirectory.
These are only for auto completion of global symbols. If the files are
missing Geany just doesn't provide these global symbol auto completion
but all other things will work anyways.
You can also skip packaging the full HTML documentation including
images. But if you do so, please include at least the text form of the
manual.
What you shouldn't skip in your package: the filetype.* files in the
data/ subdirectory, these files are important. If they are missing,
Geany still has a fallback mechanism for syntax highlighting (if
filetypes.common is installed) but several other features for certain
filetypes will fail (mainly build support).

For 32 bit builds targeting systems which support large filesystems
(eg XFS) it may be necessary to build with -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64.


Testing your package
--------------------
There are a few things to take care of when you create a package:
- Please check whether you include the following files:
  ScintillaLicense.txt, README, manual.txt, COPYING.
  ScintillaLicense.txt is the name of the installed file in the doc/
  directory. In the source distribution, this file can be found in
  scintilla/License.txt.
  The file COPYING is the GPLv2 license text and should(have to?) be
  included in your package.
- Start Geany after it was installed out of your package. Pass the
  command line argument "-v" to see whether Geany complains about
  missing files.
- Check whether the help menu item (Help->Help or F1) works and opens
  the local installed HTML documentation in your browser (if it opens
  the manual on the website you didn't install the HTML manual correctly
  and Geany falls back to the online manual).
- Check the About dialog (Help->About) whether it displays the full
  GPLv2 license text on the last tab("License").


Feedback
--------
If you have to modify anything to package the Geany sources for your
distribution/target and these changes might be generally useful, please
report your changes to us(the Geany developers) so we can apply them.
Such changes could be removing/adding any files, modifying the autotools
configuration, any modifications to some "meta" files (like
geany.desktop, images/icons, ...) or even if you have to
modify the source code to fix broken compilation or something like this.
Please inform us about changes you made, so maybe you don't have to
change it again with the next release and we can fix it in Geany itself
so others could also benefit from these changes.


Announce your packages
---------------------
After finishing your package creation, feel free to drop a note on
Geany's mailing list or directly to us (the Geany developers) to
inform us about it. If you wish, we can also add a link on Geany's
website to your package.


Geany announcements
-------------------
Package maintainers are encouraged to subscribe to the Geany mailing
list to stay informed about major changes and of course, new releases.