Geany in Windows

After yesterday's post on sharware vs. freeware vs. free, open-source software, I decided to install Geany on my Windows box. I've always liked Geany in Puppy Linux, and when I learned from the Geany Web site that the full-featured text editor was available for Windows, I had to try it.

To run in Windows, Geany needs the GTK 2 runtime libraries. Since I already have the GIMP image editor installed on this XP box, I already had GTK 2, so I was able to choose a version that didn't include the libraries.

I just started using Geany in Windows. I opened all the files I was working on last night in EditPad Lite, and now I'm not violating the EditPad license by using the program for "commercial" purposes.

So not only do I feel wrong about using pirated copies of commercial software, I'm not even comfortable running shareware or restricted freeware without paying. And with great FOSS alternatives like Geany, I don't have to.

As I say above, I first used Geany in Puppy Linux, where it is the default GUI text editor. And besides the Windows version, Geany is offered in source code as well as in packages for Gentoo, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse, Slackware, Mandriva, ArchLinux, AltLinux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Solaris.

And it looks like Geany can run in OS X (if you have the GTK libraries, I presume).

I have plenty of text editors on my Linux boxes, but I just can't work with Microsoft's Notepad. I'm no fan of Apple's text editor in OS X, either -- I'd rather open a shell and use Nano (or is it Pico that's included ... I can't remember).

I've barely begun to scratch the surface when it comes to text editors. There are dozens out there, and Wikipedia does a fairly good job of attempting to categorize and compare them.