After fighting with the latest version of Kate’s strange way of allowing you to configure the usage of tabs rather than spaces, I decided to give a Geany a try. Normally I steer clear of GTK applications simply because I’ve used so many poorly written ones. Fortunately, Geany does not fall into that category. It’s actually pretty sweet.
It allowed me to sanely define tabs as my spacing of choice. The latest Kate doesn’t even have the word tab anywhere in the configuration in relation to setting tabs for spacing. The open files panel is more useful than Kate’s, grouping open files by directory by default. There’s an interesting status bar that gives me open, close, and save status. Sort of useful.
The syntax highlighting for Ruby and JavaScript are both pretty good thus far. Out of the box it smartly indents. For example, if I hit return inside an unclosed brace, then type a closing brace, it automatically removes the extra level of indentation. Maybe Kate can be configured to do this, but it does not by default. I was excited to learn I could remap the undo key binding to my familiar CTRL-SHIFT-z for undo, instead of the default CTRL-Y I can’t easily reach.
I’ll give it a few more days and see if I’m still using Geany.