IMO, it would be better as more verbatim text explaining what each command is doing and why, rather than some magic incantation people blindly poke into the terminal, but I'm not sure HACKING is the appropriate place for that (hence the suggestion for a wiki page).
Without more verbatim explanations, I would personally recommend something more like this:
```bash export GEANY_DEV=$HOME/geany-dev
# one-time setup mkdir -p $GEANY_DEV/build $GEANY_DEV/prefix cd $GEANY_DEV git clone https://github.com/geany/geany.git source cd source NOCONFIGURE=1 ./autogen.sh
# configuring the build and when updating from Git cd $GEANY_DEV/build ../source/configure --prefix=$GEANY_DEV/prefix
# each rebuild/install/test make install
# running with a local config directory $GEANY_DEV/prefix/bin/geany -c $GEANY_DEV/config ```
Which results in a much more friendly directory structure like:
``` $HOME/geany-dev ├── build │ ├── ...build artifacts... ├── config │ ├── ...local config... ├── prefix │ ├── ...install artifacts... └── source ├── ...source tree... ```