Its useful to have user experience relative to other tools provided (not just gripes or feature demands ... erm requests), we don't get enough. There is a discussion on the Geany repo about future plans (unanswered so far, bad timing asking during the holidays) and this sort of information is useful for an analysis of where Geany is and might go, so thanks for your time too.
My experiences with Geany have, on the whole, been very positive. The docs are frustrating to me, but only because the information tends to be terse, sparse or well-scattered. It wasn't until I got into the wiki that most of my burning questions were answered. Adding tags, make and astyle have filled in the gaps. Now, if I can get Lua.
I first found Geany when I needed something that was Pascal-friendly. I converted an audio plugin to pure Free Pascal to see how it fared. At the time, I was dealing with 4 different languages (throw in the old resource compiler from Carbon days!) Unfortunately, the optimization wasn't there--the optimized Pascal version was slower than the un-optimized C++ version. I could have optimized the code further, but it would have meant doubling the code base for unknown gains.
I quite enjoyed the simplicity of Geany. Pascal needs no build system--just a main file that pulls in everything else. I also started running little single-file C speed tests as well to see how clang handled certain things. Geany is handy and doesn't give me any backtalk.
I've tried Kate, but there's issues with the KDE GUI (Kate keeps expanding until she's well beyond the screen boundaries.) I've tried VS Code. Spent an hour going through the settings and still couldn't get all the annoying popups turned off. If I want popups, I'll open my browser and pick a site at random. I spent a month writing my own VIM init and had everything I needed in 300 lines of code with no plugins. But after I discovered that there was the Super Magical Girl Shoujo Regex Special mode, I threw it all away in a fit of pique. Who needs three or four regex modes, all based on context? I wish I hadn't deleted my script, now. I've been poking at NeoVim recently.
As for IDEs, I really don't need much. I don't use autocomplete or call tips much at all and prefer to ba able to call them u[ as needed. Make can do every thing I need to clean, compile, organize and run my projects. I think I'll still need Xcode for editing .plists (no way I could ever remember those options), but the less I need to open it, the better. It's annoying that I can go in and throw out all the iOS stuff I don't use or need anymore, so Xcode now takes up 25 some Gb on my hard drive.
As an aside, the biggest problem with Java? I think they have a Dept of Stupid names. I was thinking Java really needs closures, like C# has. And voila! They announce... Lambdas! (But they're really closures...) I also needed mixins at one point. And voila! Default methods! lol what? (I know, they're not _exactly_ the same thing...)