[Geany] first experiences with geany, and some questions

[John Gabriele]

Wow -- this looks like a neat project. :)

I've been looking for a simple, fast, modern, GTK+ based editor with
some amount of code browsing features, and geany seems to really fit
the bill.

Some issues I had:

1. One problem I noticed right off the bat: auto-completion. I opened
a new file (some Ruby), and typed:

def foo
    puts "hi"
end[<-- cursor here]

then when I hit <Enter> to end the line, geany quickly tacks on
"DocumentSAXFunc" leaving me with:

def foo
	puts "hi"
endDocumentSAXFunc

I've got no idea what "endDocumentSAXFunc" is related to. Where is
geany getting this name from?

How can I shut this auto-complete off? Or at least just tell it I only
want it to try and autocomplete for core Ruby names (or names I've
'require'd in)? I've tried unchecking "Preferences --> Editor -->
Construct auto completion" but that didn't seem to do anything. Maybe
a keybinding to only use autocomplete when I want it?

2. How can I write my own syntax highlighting colorscheme? I'd like to
maybe make something like this:
http://radarzombies.org/slinky/zenburn-snapshot.png
(http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=415).

3. How can I learn about more text editing keybindings such as
up-/down-by-paragraph, indent-/dedent-current selection, go to
definition, hop between matching brackets/braces/parenthese, etc.?

4. How do I shut off current-line-highlight?

5. "Find next" isn't Ctrl-G. :) Ctrl-g seems to duplicate the current
line. Just a personal preference (and I think lots of folks may be
used to it too). The 'f' keys on my keyboard are tiny little things
that I never touch and try to avoid. :)

And also, a few other questions:

Regarding regexes, what library does geany use for those? pcre, or are
you rolling your own?

By the way, although I'm not familiar with GTK programming, I think
I'd read that some GTK-based editors (such as Anjuta and GEdit) use
GtkSourceview (http://gtksourceview.sourceforge.net/). Does geany use
Scintilla in place of that? If so, just curious, why?

Finally, stuff I really like so far:

* All the helpful pop-up help text (in the yellow boxes). Very nice --
please keep it up. :)
* Edit --> Insert Comments --> GPL notice. Nice touch. :) (though why
the extra indent there?)
* geany is quite fast.
* Color chooser seems handy to have around.
* built-in help feature found firefox right off the bat.
* <Control>-click-drag rectangual selection! :)
* Web page looks great.

Nice work.

Thanks,
---John