Geany Newsletter
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Volume 1
CC-BY -- The Geany-Newsletter team
Table of Contents
-----------------
1 Geany 0.20 has been released
2 Geany-Plugins 0.20 have beenreleased
2.1 New plugins
2.1.1 UpdateChecker
2.1.2 WebHelper
2.2 Updates & Bugfixes
2.2.1 GeanyExtraSel
2.2.2 GeanyGenDoc
2.2.3 GeanyLaTeX
2.2.4 TreeBrowser
3 Geany-Development
3.1 Update to Scintilla 2.22
3.2 Further patches
3.2.1 Support for COBOL
4 Plugins
4.1 New plugins to Geany-Plugins-project
4.1.1 Tableconvert
4.1.2 Debugger
4.1.3 GeanyPG
5 Geany Universe
5.1 New Mailing List – geany-newsletter-commits
5.2 New team member – Colomban Wendling
5.3 Geany local
5.3.1 Geany at Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2011 (March 19th, 20th)
6 Let us introduce you....
6.1 Plugin Focus
6.1.1 File Browser
6.2 Feature Focus
6.2.1 Comments formatting
7 Contact
Editorial
---------
Welcome to the first Geany newsletter with highlights of the last few
weeks during Geany development and use. This newsletter is not intended
to give a complete overview of Geany news, but is trying to collect the
most important items. Have fun and happy coding!
1 Geany 0.20 has been released
-------------------------------
On January 2011, the 6th version 0.20 of Geany "Disra" was released. As
always the release contained a number of bug fixes as well as
improvements and new features.
Some of the highlights:
* Improve compatibility with GVfs using GIO to save documents
(Alexey Antipov).
* Fix occasional crashes when closing a modified document and
choosing Save.
* Reorganize Find in Files dialog and add Files pattern to filter
search results.
* Show mimetype icon in sidebar Documents list and notebook popup
menu (Colomban Wendling).
* Add per-document indent width setting (Jiri Techet).
* Fix passing quoted arguments when using ’Send Selection to’. This
means e.g. sed ’s/\./(dot)/g’ now works.
* Add alternative color scheme based on Python colors
(View-Editor-Color Schemes - not all filetypes supported yet).
* Auto-indent after an HTML/XML line without a closing tag (Eugene
Arshinov).
* Add Forth filetype (Thomas Huth).
* Add Lisp filetype (Mário Silva).
* Add Erlang filetype (Taylor Venable).
* Add translations: kk.
* Update translations: cs, de, en_GB, es, fi, fr, hu, ja, nl, pt,
sl, sv, tr, zh_CN.
2 Geany-Plugins 0.20 have been released
----------------------------------------
Shortly after the release of Geany the Geany-Plugins collection was
released with version 0.20. This collection includes a number of useful
plugins, not shipped with Geany itself. This release is the result of
about 6 months of development work and so it has quite a number of
changes and some new plugins:
2.1 New plugins
================
2.1.1 UpdateChecker
********************
UpdateChecker implements a check for new releases of Geany and notifies
the user when one is available. It’s based on libsoup and can be
configured to check during startup or on request.
2.1.2 WebHelper
****************
WebHelper is a plugin that provides some web development facilities,
such as a web page preview and some debugging tools (web inspector).
The plugin implements the following features:
* A basic web view, allowing the display of any web page (using
WebKit);
* Possible automatic reloading of the web view upon document saving;
* A web inspector/debugging tool for the web view’s content
(including a JavaScript console, a viewer and editor of processed
HTML and CSS, a network usage analysis tool and many more, thanks
to WebKit).
2.2 Updates & Bugfixes
=======================
Also there have been a lot of bugfixes and updates on plugins. For
further details please check the Release notes and/or the ChangeLog of
plugins. A few selected changes are:
2.2.1 GeanyExtraSel
********************
* Respect ’Smart’ home key (Geany does now).
* Fixed Scintilla Shift+movement key conversion of rectangle
selection.
* Virtual spaces support.
* Per-file column mode.
* Added "Set Anchor", "Select to Anchor" and "Rectangle Select to
Anchor".
2.2.2 GeanyGenDoc
******************
* Bump dependency on CTPL to 0.3.
* Add a popup menu for common actions in the documentation type
selector.
* Fix indentation of inserted documentation blocs.
* Documentation type now defaults to Doxygen (rather than nothing).
* Add policy PASS to completely ignore a symbol.
* Add basic rules for PHP.
* Fix build against GTK+ 2.16.
* Don’t copy the system configuration file to the user’s one when
hitting "Edit Current Language Configuration", only write it when
saving changes.
2.2.3 GeanyLaTeX
*****************
* Move LaTeX-menu to a separate menu inside Geany main menu.
* Add a feature to auto-capitalize letters on typing the beginning
of a sentence.
* Add a way to put an icon for LaTeX-wizard into Geany’s main
toolbar.
* Added a dialog for inserting BibTeX references based on available
*.bib- files.
2.2.4 TreeBrowser
******************
* Added bookmarks support.
* Added keybindings support.
* Added mime type icons in the tree.
* Many bugfixes and code improvements.
3 Geany-Development
--------------------
After the 0.20 release the development has slowed down a bit but
nevertheless, some changes did happen:
3.1 Update to Scintilla 2.22
=============================
Right after the release of Geany 0.20 with Subversion r5521 an updated
version of Scintilla was been merged from the unstable branch into
trunk. Geany trunk is now running with version 2.22 of the Scintilla
editing component.
3.2 Further patches
====================
3.2.1 Support for COBOL
************************
At the end of January 2011 a patch was committed to Geany trunk which
enabled COBOL support inside Geany. Now it’s possible to use features
like syntax highlighting for this language.
4 Plugins
----------
It was a quite active time right after the 0.20 release on the plugin
development side.
4.1 New plugins to Geany-Plugins-project
=========================================
4.1.1 Tableconvert
******************+
After a little chaos with naming, the new plugin Tableconvert was added
to the development version of the Geany-Plugins. It offers a way to
convert tab separated lists (e.g. imported from Microsoft Excel or
LibreOffice Calc) into a table. Currently the plugin supports HTML and
LATEX tables.
4.1.2 Debugger
***************
The Debugger plugin has added a second binding for gdb to the
Geany-Plugins project.
4.1.3 GeanyPG
**************
With GeanyPG Hans Alves submitted a new plugin to geany-plugins project
which adds support for signing, encrypting and decryption of text files
opened in Geany.
5 Geany Universe
-----------------
5.1 New Mailing List – geany-newsletter-commits
================================================
When the geany-newsletter project was started, a new commit mailing was
created. The goal of this list is to notify all interested people
whenever a new commit has taken place inside the geany-newsletter git
repository. As always you can find the list via
http://www.geany.org/Support/MailingList
5.2 New team member – Colomban Wendling
========================================
In March 2011, Colomban Wendling joined the Geany core team. Over the
last few years he has submitted a lot of patches. He did a great job
during the last month - e.g. building up a tagmanager-in-memory
patchset as well as providing a big number of patches and providing
support on both the mailing list as well as IRC. Welcome Colomban!
5.3 Geany local
================
5.3.1 Geany at Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2011 (March 19th, 20th)
************************************************************
On the coming weekend (around March 19th, 20th) there will be a local
Linux and FOSS convention in Chemnitz, Germany. Some of the Geany guys
will be around and have a little booth at the event. So if you are
nearby, come join us for a chat. You will find us next to the Xfce guys.
Details for this convention can be find on their homepage at http://
chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/2011/
6 Let us introduce you....
---------------------------
This section is intended to introduce particular plugins or features on
a regular basis.
6.1 Plugin Focus
=================
6.1.1 File Browser
*******************
The File Browser plugins adds to the sidebar a tab with which you can
browser files and folders. By default it shows the contents of the
folder containing the first file opened in Geany. You can navigate to
other drives and folders using any of the options available at the very
top of the tab:
* Up: Navigates to one folder higher in the file system.
* Home: Navigates to your Home folder.
* Set path from document: Sets the active folder to the one containing
the current active document.
* Folder input box: Here you can enter any path you want to see in the
File Browser. As you type the path it will offer autocompletion of the
folder’s name.
Also at the top of the tab is the Filter input box in which you can
enter a file specification of those files you want to appear in the
File Browser. The file specifications must be quite simple - e.g. g*.py
or *.xml. Regular expressions are not supported. To clear the filter
either click on the icon at the right of the Filter input box or empty
the Filter box and press [Enter].
6.2 Feature Focus
==================
6.2.1 Comments formatting
**************************
When writing source code or in a markup language, it’s often necessary
to mark one or more lines as a comment. Geany offers several functions
from the Edit -> Format sub-menu which make this very easy:
* Comment Line(s)
* Uncomment Line(s)
* Toggle Line Commentation
To use these options on a single line, put the cursor on that line and
select the menu option. To use them on a block of code, select the
whole block then select the menu option. The Toggle Line Commentation
menu option will, as its name suggests, add comment markers to a normal
line/section of code and, if the line/section is already a comment,
remove the comment markers. What’s great about these options is that
they insert or remove the comment markers applicable to the type of
file being edited. This means that you can focus on the content of what
you’re editing instead of having to worry about getting the comment
markers right. This is precisely Geany’s aim: to make coding easier and
faster without getting in your way.
7 Contact
----------
If you like to contribute to the newsletter, make a request or
complaint about content please contact frank(a)geany.org via email.
Hello,
I use Geany all the day and I noticed that to have multi terminals which can be
switched by tabs would be really handy. Istead of opening several terminals in
background.
Fred.