Hi All,
Along with the previous response on the icon, the following was proposal was also received from Clement of the Mint distro:
"Another thing I wanted to ask you about, and I'm glad you contacted us, is about the configuration of Geany as a text editor for users (as opposed to developers). Geany is brilliant and I personally use it as a developer to do most of my work in Python, C, PHP and other languages. But it could also be a great contender for a default text editor in Linux Mint in replacement of gedit. We're not happy at all with gedit 3, in particular when it comes to searching and replacing occurrences in a text file. We considered replacing it with Geany, with an older GTK2 version of gedit or even forking it to provide a new tool dedicated to text editing.
What is your opinion on this? If we used Geany for this, we would hide all developer features (symbols, buttons, statusbars..etc) from it. Would you rather like us shipping a version of geany which by default looks like a simple text editor (and so devs would have to go in the preferences and re-enable all the normal features) or fork geany into a new project dedicated to text editing (i.e. basically a dumbed down version of geany with features removed). With a fork of course we'd give credit to geany in our communication and within the tool itself, we'd work with you on making sure you're happy with the end-result and the editor would have a distinct generic name ("text editor" for instance) so it would be possible for users to have both this editor and geany installed side-by-side and to open documents with either of them. Let me know your thoughts on this. We're not sure what the best approach is, but whether it happens now or later, we're pretty sure gedit 3 isn't what we want to use going forward."
To kick the ball off, here is my thoughts on the topic.
First thought is that there is plenty of upside to such cooperation in terms of attracting more contributors to the developer version of Geany.
The flip side of that is of course that more bugs would be reported and expected to be fixed. (Bug reports are good, its the *expectation* that they will be quickly fixed that is the problem.) I would hope that Mint would be able to contribute to that effort.
I am not sure how much effort it would take to make the Geany UI able to hide the "developer" features, it will be some complication for sure, but probably not a big one.
If Mint use a "friendly fork" approach it does reduce the impact this has on the Geany project, but it will also reduce the possible bugfixes that come back to Geany (since the fork is different patches may not apply).
If we provide the "plain editor" version as an option on Geany it adds to the workload, though I would hope that Mint would contribute to that extra effort.
I am personally undecided at the moment, noting that Mint will do what is appropriate for their distro, and it is up to us to try to engage with them ina way that provides the maximum benefit for both groups.
Cheers Lex