On 2017-05-06 09:32 AM, Chris Spencer wrote:
Hi,
I'm looking for a replacement for Eclipse, and I recently discovered Geany. I've installed it and all of it's plugins from the Ubuntu 16 packages, and now I'm trying to understand it's interface. It seems to have most of the features of Eclipse, but a few major things are missing, so I'd hope someone can confirm these are missing or clarify where they are. Specifically:
- Git integration
Eclipse's eGit plugin allows you to: a. commit all changes in a project b. view a graphical diff and resolve merges of all changes in a project c. see all file changes and conflicts in a project's tree browser via folder/filename icons
Does Geany have a plugin that does this? There appears to a git-changebar plugin, but even though I created a project for my local git repo and enabled the plugin, there doesn't appear to be any git actions shown anywhere, nor is it reflecting any changes that are made. Unfortunately, the git-changebar doc site (https://plugins.geany.org/git-changebar.html) has virtually no documentation on how to use the plugin.
- Multiple project browsing
I can create an arbitrary number of projects in Eclipse and edit files from multiple projects simultaneously. How do you do this in Geany? I can create and open a project, but I seem to be only able to view one project's files at a time, which is a huge limitation.
- Project wide file search
Eclipse has a feature to search all files in all projects. I see I can right-click in Geany and select "Find in Files", but this doesn't appear to work. For example searching for the string literal "ss FooBar(" returns no files with matching content and a dozen error messages like:
grep -nHIiF -- "ss FooBar(" (in directory:/home/chris/git/myproject/src) /bin/grep: dir1: Is a directory /bin/grep: dir2: Is a directory /bin/grep: dir3: Is a directory
Am I missing something? Where are search results shown?
Other than that, Geany performs very well, and if I can figure out how to plug these feature gaps, I'd really like to start using it. Memory-wise alone, it's a huge improvement over Eclipse, which consumes 20% of my 8GB of memory, compared to 0.5% with Geany.
Geany isn't really a replacement for all of the features of Eclipse, it's more like Vim or Emacs but easier to use and more expected stuff working out of the box.
One important difference is Geany projects are not like Eclipse/VS workspace/solutions, they're more like a simple session/collection of editor settings.
Regards, Matthew Brush