[Geany] before Geany...

[John Gabriele]

On 3/14/07, Luzius Thoeny <lucius.antonius at gmail.com> wrote:
> [snip] I tried emacs and found out why people call it an OS, not
> an editor :O)

Well, if you like, you don't have to use all its OS features. You can
just use it like an IDE, or even just an editor. :)

BTW, note that the actual editing environment for Emacs is very finely
tuned after many years of use, and it's very efficient. Little things
that are hard to put your finger on (no pun intended :) ), like how
move-by-word skips over punctuation in a handy way (Geany (by virtue
of its choice of editor component: Scintilla) stops the cursor on each
side of punctuation, so it takes more key strokes to move around).
Also, Emacs has got features like "redraw screen centered on cursor"
(C-l), cut to end of line (C-k), and "select paragraph" (M-h).  Little
things like that add up to make for a very smooth editing experience,
and stiff competition for Geany.

There's also incremental search, which is a very fast way to get
around in an editor. (I realize that Geany has find-in-file, and it
works well too, maybe even better, but not faster UI-wise.)

Of course, Geany is still young, and may get a number of those
features and refinements over time. I'm a fan of both Geany *and* GNU
Emacs. So far, IMO, Geany's killer feature is probably how easy it is
to learn (though, I haven't tried its Project or Build features).

---John