After a little archaeology, there was discussion about this [here](https://sourceforge.net/p/geany/bugs/730/) Then it was moved to Github, mixed in with an unrelated commit in #1. Then it was split out into #6, but then closed by the author @losingkeys due to inactivity.
The only part that confuses me is that the above mentioned issues were to do exactly the opposite of what this question is asking for, and I cannot see any relevant changes to this code in the intervening code.