Geany custom file type

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Jump to bottom. Labels filetype. Milestone 1. Copy link. Fix stripping trailing spaces for custom file types using the DIFF le… …. Fix stripping trailing spaces for custom file types using the DIFF lexer Contributor Author. Fix stripping trailing spaces for custom file types using the DIFF lexer.

Could not load branches. Could not load tags. Latest commit. Git stats 13 commits. Failed to load latest commit information. The documents list and the editor tabs are two different ways to switch between documents using the mouse.

When you hit the key combination to move between tabs, the order is determined by the tab order. It is not alphabetical as shown in the documents list regardless of whether or not editor tabs are visible. See the Notebook tab keybindings section for useful shortcuts including for Most-Recently-Used document switching.

If there is a selection, only the selected text is copied. This can be useful when making temporary copies of text or for creating documents with similar or identical contents. Geany provides support for detecting and converting character sets.

So you can open and save files in different character sets, and even convert a file from one character set to another. To do this, Geany uses the character conversion capabilities of the GLib library. Only text files are supported, i. Geany will try to open the file anyway but it is likely that the file will be truncated because it can only be read up to the first occurrence of a NULL-byte.

All characters after this position are lost and are not written when you save the file. Geany tries to detect the encoding of a file while opening it, but auto-detecting the encoding of a file is not easy and sometimes an encoding might not be detected correctly. In this case you have to set the encoding of the file manually in order to display it correctly. You can this in the file open dialog by selecting an encoding in the drop down box or by reloading the file with the file menu item "Reload as".

The auto-detection works well for most encodings but there are also some encodings where it is known that auto-detection has problems. This opens the file with the encoding specified in the encoding drop down box.

If the encoding is set to "Detect from file" auto-detection will be used. If the encoding is set to "Without encoding None " the file will be opened without any character conversion and Geany will not try to auto-detect the encoding see below for more information.

This item reloads the current file with the specified encoding. It can help if you opened a file and found out that the wrong encoding was used. Contrary to the above two options, this will not change or reload the current file unless you save it.

It is useful when you want to change the encoding of the file. As mentioned above, auto-detecting the encoding of a file may fail on some encodings. If you know that Geany doesn't open a certain file, you can add the specification line, described in the next section, to the beginning of the file to force Geany to use a specific encoding when opening the file. This is useful if the encoding of the file cannot be detected properly. For non-HTML files you can also define a line like:.

Whitespace characters are in this case a space or tab character. An example to use this could be you have a file with ISO encoding but Geany constantly detects the file encoding as ISO Then you simply add such a line to the file and Geany will open it correctly the next time. Since Geany 0. These specifications must be in the first bytes of the file. Anything after the first bytes will not be recognized.

There is a special encoding "None" which uses no encoding. It is useful when you know that Geany cannot auto-detect the encoding of a file and it is not displayed correctly. Especially when the file contains NULL-bytes this can be useful to skip auto detection and open the file properly at least until the occurrence of the first NULL-byte.

Using this encoding opens the file as it is without any character conversion. Of course, this feature is only available if the opened file is in a Unicode encoding. The Byte Order Mark helps to detect the encoding of a file, e. On Unix-like systems using a Byte Order Mark could cause some problems for programs not expecting it, e. In the status bar you can easily see whether the file starts with a BOM or not. If you want to set a BOM for a file or if you want to remove it from a file, just use the document menu and toggle the checkbox.

If you are unsure what a BOM is or if you do not understand where to use it, then it is probably not important for you and you can safely ignore it. Geany provides basic code folding support. Folding means the ability to show and hide parts of the text in the current file. You can hide unimportant code sections and concentrate on the parts you are working on and later you can show hidden sections again.

By clicking on these icons you can simply show and hide sections which are marked by vertical lines within this margin. For many filetypes nested folding is supported, so there may be several fold points within other fold points. You can customize the folding icon and line styles - see the filetypes. If you don't like it or don't need it at all, you can simply disable folding support completely in the preferences dialog. When clicking on a [-] symbol, Geany will fold all nested fold points below the current one if they are unfolded.

This option can be inverted by pressing the Shift key while clicking on a fold symbol. There is basic support for column mode editing. To use it, create a rectangular selection by holding down the Control and Shift keys or Alt and Shift on Windows while selecting some text. Once a rectangular selection exists you can start editing the text within this selection and the modifications will be done for every line in the selection. It is also possible to create a zero-column selection - this is useful to insert text on multiple lines.

If you drag selected text in the editor widget of Geany the text is moved to the position where the mouse pointer is when releasing the mouse button. Holding Control when releasing the mouse button will copy the text instead. This behaviour was changed in Geany 0.

Geany allows each document to indent either with a tab character, multiple spaces or a combination of both. The Tabs setting indents with one tab character per indent level, and displays tabs as the indent width. The Spaces setting indents with the number of spaces set in the indent width for each level. The default indent settings are set in Editor Indentation preferences see the link for more information. The default settings can be overridden per-document using the Document menu.

They can also be overridden by projects - see Project management. After changing the default settings you may wish to apply the new settings to every document in the current session. The Detect from file indentation preference can be used to scan each file as it's opened and set the indent type based on how many lines start with a tab vs.

When enabled, auto-indentation happens when pressing Enter in the Editor. It adds a certain amount of indentation to the new line so the user doesn't always have to indent each line manually. There is also XML-tag auto-indentation. Geany provides a handy bookmarking feature that lets you mark one or more lines in a document, and return the cursor to them using a key combination.

To place a mark on a line, either left-mouse-click in the left margin of the editor window, or else use Ctrl-m. This will produce a small green plus symbol in the margin. You can have as many marks in a document as you like. Click again or use Ctrl-m again to remove the bookmark.

To remove all the marks in a given document, use "Remove Markers" in the Document menu. To navigate down your document, jumping from one mark to the next, use Ctrl-. To go in the opposite direction on the page, use Ctrl-, control comma. To ease navigation in source files and especially between different files, Geany lets you jump between different navigation points.

Currently, this works for the following:. When using one of these actions, Geany remembers your current position and jumps to the new one. If you decide to go back to your previous position in the file, just use "Navigate back a location". To get back to the new position again, just use "Navigate forward a location". This makes it easier to navigate in e. The output of the command will be used to replace the current selection.

This makes it possible to use text formatting tools with Geany in a general way. The selected text will be sent to the standard input of the executed command, so the command should be able to read from it and it should print all results to its standard output which will be read by Geany.

To help finding errors in executing the command, the output of the program's standard error will be printed on Geany's standard output.

Click on Add to get a new item and type the command. You can also specify some command line options. Empty commands are not saved. The above example would normally be done with the Replace all function, but it can be handy to have common commands already set up. Note that the command is not run in a shell, so if you want to use shell features like pipes and command chains, you need to explicitly launch the shell and pass it your command:. You can execute the context action command on the current word at the cursor position or the available selection.

This word or selection can be used as an argument to the command. The context action is invoked by a menu entry in the popup menu of the editor and also a keyboard shortcut see the section called Keybindings.

When the context action is invoked, the filetype specific command is used if available, otherwise the command specified in the preferences dialog is executed. Geany can offer a list of possible completions for symbols defined in the tags files and for all words in open documents. The autocompletion list for symbols is presented when the first few characters of the symbol are typed configurable, see Editor Completions preferences , default 4 or when the Complete word keybinding is pressed configurable, see Editor keybindings , default Ctrl-Space.

When the defined keybinding is typed and the Autocomplete all words in document preference in Editor Completions preferences is selected then the autocompletion list will show all matching words in the document, if there are no matching symbols. If you don't want to use autocompletion it can be dismissed until the next symbol by pressing Escape.

The autocompletion list is updated as more characters are typed so that it only shows completions that start with the characters typed so far. If no symbols begin with the sequence, the autocompletion window is closed. The up and down arrows will move the selected item.

You can also double-click to select an item. The sequence will be completed to match the chosen item, and if the Drop rest of word on completion preference is set in Editor Completions preferences then any characters after the cursor that match a symbol or word are deleted. By default, pressing Tab will complete the selected item by word part; useful e.

The key combination can be changed from Tab - See Editor keybindings. When you type foo. It only works for languages that set parent scope names for e. Currently this means C-like languages. The C parser only parses global scopes, so this won't work for structs or objects declared in local scope. Snippets are small strings or code constructs which can be replaced or completed to a more complex string. So you can save a lot of time when typing common strings and letting Geany do the work for you.

To know what to complete or replace Geany reads a configuration file called snippets. The key to start autocompletion can be changed in the preferences dialog, by default it is TAB. The corresponding keybinding is called Complete snippet. You can override the default snippets using the user snippets. See also Configuration file paths. This adds the default settings to the user file if the file doesn't exist. Alternatively the file can be created manually, adding only the settings you want to change.

All missing settings will be read from the system snippets file. The file snippets. The two sections "Default" and "Special" apply to all filetypes. So you can define often used parts of snippets and just use the special snippet as a placeholder see the snippets. The snippets in that section are only available for use in files with that filetype. Snippets in filetype sections will hide snippets with the same name in the "Default" section when used in a file of that filetype.

To define snippets you can use several special character sequences which will be replaced when using the snippet:. Snippet names must not contain spaces otherwise they won't work correctly. But beside that you can define almost any string as a snippet and use it later in Geany. It is not limited to existing contructs of certain programming languages like if , for , switch.

Define whatever you need. All wildcards which are listed as available in snippets can be used. For instance to improve the above example:. You can change the way Geany recognizes the word to complete, that is how the start and end of a word is recognised when the snippet completion is requested.

The section "Special" may contain a key "wordchars" which lists all characters a string may contain to be recognized as a word for completion. Leave it commented to use default characters or define it to add or remove characters to fit your needs. Normally you would type the snippet name and press Tab. However, you can define keybindings for snippets under the Keybindings group in snippets. You can insert Unicode code points by hitting Ctrl-Shift-u, then still holding Ctrl-Shift, type some hex digits representing the code point for the character you want and hit Enter or Return still holding Ctrl-Shift.

If you release Ctrl-Shift before hitting Enter or Return or any other character , the code insertion is completed, but the typed character is also entered. Note that it works slightly differently from other GTK applications, in that you'll need to continue to hold down the Ctrl and Shift keys while typing the code point hex digits and the Enter or Return to finish the code point.

A dialog appears to select the wanted color. If text is selected, then it will be replaced with the color code on the first click on Apply or Select. If no text is selected or on subsequent clicks the color code is inserted at the current cursor position.

This section describes search-related commands from the Search menu and the editor window's popup menu:. There are keybindings to focus each of these - see Focus keybindings. Pressing Escape will then focus the editor. The quickest way to find some text is to use the search bar entry in the toolbar. This performs a case-insensitive search in the current document whilst you type.

Pressing Enter will search again, and pressing Shift-Enter will search backwards. The syntax for the Use regular expressions option is shown in Regular expressions.

The Use multi-line matching option enables multi-line regular expressions instead of single-line ones. See Regular expressions for more details on the differences between the two modes. The Use escape sequences option will transform any escaped characters into their UTF-8 equivalent.

Find All In Document will show a list of matching lines in the current document in the Messages tab of the Message Window. Find All In Session does the same for all open documents. Mark will highlight all matches in the current document with a colored box. These markers can be removed by selecting the Remove Markers command from the Document menu. All search related dialogs use a Monospace font for the text input fields to increase the readability of input text. This is useful when you are typing input such as regular expressions with spaces, periods and commas which might be hard to read with a proportional font.

If nothing is selected, by default the current word is used instead. Find Usage searches all open files. If there is a selection, then it is used as the search text; otherwise the current word is used. The current word is either taken from the word nearest the edit cursor, or the word underneath the popup menu click position when the popup menu is used.

The search results are shown in the Messages tab of the Message Window. Find in Files is a more powerful version of Find Usage that searches all files in a certain directory using the Grep tool.

The Grep tool must be correctly set in Preferences to the path of the system's Grep utility. GNU Grep is recommended see note below. The Search field is initially set to the current word in the editor depending on Search preferences.

The Files setting allows to choose which files are included in the search, depending on the mode:. Both project and custom patterns use a glob-style syntax, each pattern separated by a space.

To search all. Note that an empty pattern list searches in all files rather than none. The Directory field is initially set to the current document's directory, unless this field has already been edited and the current document has not changed. Otherwise, the current document's directory is prepended to the drop-down history.

This can be disabled - see Search preferences. The Encoding field can be used to define the encoding of the files to be searched. The entered search text is converted to the chosen encoding and the search results are converted back to UTF When using the Recurse in subfolders option with a directory that's under version control, you can set the Extra options field to filter out version control files. If you have an older Grep, you can try using the --exclude flag to filter out filenames.

The Replace dialog has the same options for matching text as the Find dialog. See the section Matching options. To replace several matches, click on the Replace All expander. This will reveal several options:. Replace All In Document will replace all matching text in the current document. Replace All In Session does the same for all open documents. Replace All In Selection will replace all matching text in the current selection of the current document. If the current word or selection is the name of a symbol definition e.

The current word is either the word nearest the edit cursor, or the word underneath the popup menu click position when the popup menu is used. If there are more symbols with the same name to which the goto can be performed, a pop up is shown with a list of all the occurrences. After selecting a symbol from the list Geany jumps to the corresponding symbol location. Geany tries to suggest the nearest symbol symbol from the current file, other open documents or current directory as the best candidate for the goto and places this symbol at the beginning of the list typed in boldface.

If the corresponding symbol is on the current line, Geany will first look for a symbol declaration instead, as this is more useful. Likewise Go to symbol declaration will search for a symbol definition first in this case also. Like Go to symbol definition , but for a forward declaration such as a C function prototype or extern declaration instead of a function body.

You can use regular expressions in the Find and Replace dialogs by selecting the Use regular expressions check box see Matching options. The syntax is Perl compatible.

Basic syntax is described in the table below. By default regular expressions are matched on a line-by-line basis. If you are interested in multi-line regular expressions, matched against the whole buffer at once, see the section Multi-line regular expressions below.

Where n is 1 through 9 refers to the first through ninth tagged region when searching or replacing. A backslash followed by d, D, s, S, w or W, becomes a character class both inside and outside sets []. Matches one of the characters in the set. A shorthand S-E start dash end is used to specify a set of characters S up to E, inclusive. The special characters ] and - have no special meaning if they appear first in the set. To include both, put ] first: []A-Z-].

The Use multi-line matching dialog option enables multi-line regular expressions. Multi-line regular expressions work just like single-line ones but a match can span several lines. The View menu allows various elements of the main window to be shown or hidden, and also provides various display-related editor options. It lists various color schemes for editor highlighting styles, including the default scheme first. Other items are available based on what color scheme files Geany found at startup.

Color scheme files are read from the Configuration file paths under the colorschemes subdirectory. They should have the extension. The default color scheme is read from filetypes. The name and description keys are read to set the menu item text and tooltip, respectively. These keys can have translations, e. Upon opening, files of supported filetypes are parsed to extract the symbol information aka "workspace symbols".

Geany uses its own tags file format, similar to what ctags uses but is incompatible with ctags. You use Geany to generate global tags files, as described below. Each document is parsed for symbols whenever a file is loaded, saved or modified see Symbol list update frequency preference in the Editor Completions preferences.

These are shown in the Symbol list in the Sidebar. These symbols are also used for autocompletion and calltips for all documents open in the current session that have the same filetype. The Go to Symbol commands can be used with all workspace symbols.

See Go to symbol definition. Global tags files are used to provide symbols for autocompletion and calltips without having to open the source files containing these symbols. This is intended for library APIs, as the tags file only has to be updated when you upgrade the library. See the section called Filetype extensions for more information.

Some global tags files are distributed with Geany and will be loaded automatically when the corresponding filetype is first used. Currently this includes global tags files for these languages:. This helps Geany to read the file properly. If this line is missing, Geany tries to auto-detect the used format but this might fail. The Tagmanager format is a bit more complex and is used for files created by the geany -g command.

There is one symbol per line. Different symbol attributes like the return value or the argument list are separated with different characters indicating the type of the following argument. This is the more complete and recommended tags file format. The Pipe-separated format is easier to read and write.

There is one symbol per line and different symbol attributes are separated by the pipe character. A line looks like:. Except for the first field symbol name , all other field can be left empty but the pipe separator must appear for them. You can easily write your own global tags files using this format. Just save them in your tags directory, as described earlier in the section Global tags files.

This is the format that ctags generates, and that is used by Vim. This format is compatible with the format historically used by Vi.

However, note that Geany may actually only honor a subset of the existing extensions. You may need to first setup the C ignore. If you do not want this, use the -P option described above. The following example works with the bash shell, generating a tags file for the GnomeUI library:. You can ignore certain symbols for C-based languages if they would lead to wrong parsing of the code.

This will ignore the above macros and will correctly detect 'Foo' as a type instead of 'BAR' in the following code:.