Getting Started

Before diving into the details and API docs for programming plugins with GeanyPy, it’s important to note how it works and some features it provides.

What the heck is GeanyPy, really?

GeanyPy is a proxy plugin. Geany initially sees GeanyPy as any other plugin, but GeanyPy registers some additional stuff that enables Geany to load python plugins through GeanyPy. So to activate, use Geany’s Plugin Manager under the Tools menu as you would for any other plugin.

Once the GeanyPy plugin has been activated, Geany should rescan the plugin directories and pick those up that are supported through GeanyPy. It’ll integrate the python plugins into the Plugin Manager in an additional hierarchy level below GeanyPy.

  • [ ] Geany plugin 1
  • [x] GeanyPy
  • [ ] Python plugin 1
  • [x] Python plugin 2
  • [ ] Python plugin 3
  • [ ] Geany plugin 3

Remember that Geany looks in three places for plugins:

  1. For system-wide plugins, it will search in (usually) /usr/share/geany or /usr/local/share/geany.
  2. In Geany’s config directory under your home directory, typically ~/.config/geany/plugins.
  3. A user-configurable plugin directory (useful during plugin development).

Python Console

Another pretty cool feature of GeanyPy is the Python Console, which similar to the regular Python interactive interpreter console, but it’s found in the Message Window area (bottom) in Geany. The geany Python module used to interact with Geany will be pre-imported for you, so you can mess around with Geany using the console, without ever having to even write a plugin.

Credits: The Python Console was taken, almost in its entirety, from the medit text editor. Props to the author(s) for such a nice piece of source code

Future Plans

Some time in the near future, there should be support for sending text from the active document into the Python Console. It will also be possible to have the Python Console either in a separate window, in the sidebar notebook or in the message window notebook.

Also, either integration with Geany’s keybindings UI under the preferences dialog or a separate but similar UI just for Python plugins will be added. Currently using keybindings requires a certain amount of hackery, due to Geany expecting all plugins to be shared libraries written in C.