I have been using the default text editor in Ubuntu, Gedit, and have modified it to work it like an IDE. It worked good, but still lacked a lot of features which a good IDE would have (like code folding, symbols browser etc). Lately, I saw a blog post with a mention of few new IDEs around which are as light wieght as G-Edit. That is when i first heard of Geany.

Geany is a lightweight but surprisingly powerful GTK-based IDE. I am totaly sold over it and it has become my default IDE in just 2 hours of playing around. Works beautifully with Python, Django, HTML, JS, CSS and FreeSWITCH C source files. Thats all i need for my coding. But Im sure it plays well with other languages too. It has advanced features of an IDE and remains very light weight.

How to Install Geany in Ubuntu 10.10

 add-apt-repository ppa:geany-dev/ppa

apt-get update

apt-get install geany

apt-get install geany-plugins

apt-get install xterm

These are the customizations I did from my side:

1. Enable the required plugins, from Tools > Plugin Manager

2. Enable Django template syntax highlighting:

- Copy /usr/share/geany/filetypes.html to ~/.config/geany/filedefs/

- Find the [lexer_properties] section of the file and add, the following line:

lexer.html.django=1

3. Copy the file below to ~/.config/geany/  (This includes, python snippets, basic django model basic, basic django template snippets, html snippets, js snippets and css snippets)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/668529/conf/snippets.conf