There are a ton of themes (dark, light, colorful) for it that you can enable from the View settings. YoĪnother strong point of Geany is that it is highly customizable. The other plugin is Split Window which divides the editor pane into two which you may find useful to display two different codes side-by-side or compare different revisions of a single file. There are two GUI related plugins with File Browser probably being the more useful as it adds an option to browse files to the left sidebar. You can enable autosave, instant save, back up copy by using the Save Actions plugin. There is status tab which shows the activity log, a compiler tab which displays whether your code is fine, a messages tab, and a scribble tab for notes. The panels at the bottom of the screen are what I found interesting. You can manage your Projects from the Project toolbar and find all files of a project listed by the editor so that you may select them when the need arises.
Speaking of which, the Document menu has various formatting tools from line breaking, wrapping, indentation, programming file type (language selection), encoding among other options. You can use the find in files option from the Search menu to search for text in documents. The edit menu lets you perform various functions including inserting comments, tags or dates. This obviously requires the platform you're coding in to be installed, for e.g. You can compile the code right from the application and click on the execute button to run it. Apart from the standard options, the toolbar has a revert button for reloading the current document. There is a menu bar at the top of the screen and a toolbar right below it. The large pane on the right side is the editor and it has line numbers like any programmer friendly editor this pane has a tab bar at the top, which you can use to switch from one document to another. I just learned about the existence of pdb, the Python Debugger, which requires some looking into.The program's interface has two side-panels, one for symbols and one for Documents (tree-style). That being said, I still plan to write plenty of Python on basic text editors (Notepad++ for Windows, nano, vim, LeafPad, Midnight Commander, etc.) and call scripts from the terminal. VerdictĪfter playing with each of the default IDEs, I am a new fan of Thonny, especially when it comes to teaching Python for first-time users on the Raspberry Pi (and likely other computers, as well). While Thonny supports only Python, it is a breeze to use with a slick interface and a friendly debugger. This acts as a simple breakpoint, but only one can be set at a time. You can select Run > Run to cursor, which will interrupt the program at whichever line your cursor is on. The one downside of the debugger is that it does not support traditional breakpoints. This can be incredibly useful when writing code as a beginner to see how variables change and comparisons work. At the top, you'll see large, friendly buttons for adding a file, loading, saving, running, stopping and debugging.
This is evident as soon as you open the program – only the editor and terminal appear in the window. Thonny was written from the ground up with a singular focus: to be a Python IDE for beginners. Also, the lack of a debugger makes me a sad panda. It certainly has a slick interface, but the extra features to support other languages ultimately take up space and clutter your screen when real estate is at a premium. You can install a debugging panel with sudo apt-get install geany-plugins, but even that one does not seem to work with Python (it seems to be intended for debugging C/C++ with gdb).
The bad news is that Geany does not come with a debugger. The good news is that Geany works with many different programming languages out of the box, so if you learn to use Geany for Python, you can easily start using it to develop C/C++, Java, HTML, Erlang, etc. That being said, all these features, while well laid out, can clutter a small screen pretty quickly.