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Fighting with Geany & Terminator

After several years with CrunchBang Linux, learning in 2013 that it was discontinued was horrifying. The distro worked out of the box, provided an easy to use interface but also gave the user enough freedom to tweak settings and interfaces in order to help making it a little friendlier. In early 2014 I fried a hard drive. Well, the hard drive died and the CPU went with it. Could have been a flaw in the BIOS that let the system overheat, could have been that I dropped the laptop a fair number of times and the heat sink wasn’t working as intended. Potato potato.

Upon changing hardware, the first requirement was getting CrunchBang back on board. Alas, it didn’t exist anymore… or so it seemed. Fortunately, the community rebuilt it around BunsenLabs. The first installation, BL-Hydrogen… was a major headache. Arguably, a bad case of PEBCAK. After some tinkering, it was running again with the same and improved welcome script. The decisions on the packaged software… everything made sense. Terminator provides an excellent experience, allowing to have the man page for a command on one pane, and the 5 3000 attempts at getting the flags right on the other, with no need to change windows or tabs. But more importantly, it came with Geany as the default text editor. Geany was like a personal assistant when I was writing any form of code, no matter the language. F5 and a terminal would open, display the result and request I press “enter” to close the window.

Attempting to run the same code from a terminal as ./myProgram.py or python3 myScript.py would throw errors left right and centre. Geany and F5? Just results. So after deciding to tackle the Project Euler challenges one more time, it made perfect sense to go back to this winning combo.

Except somewhere along the line the system broke. Pressing the F5 key instead of running the code only opened a new terminal window in the location of the file. F5 here, F5 there, nothing. Internet searches showed that I was not alone, but for some reason I could not find the settings affected users were changing to fix the issue. Fortunately, Geany is more than just a text editor, and comes with a built in terminal emulator. A single result, but incredibly useful nonetheless, allowed me to at least get F5 working again. Solution was here.

While this is only a workaround, it does provide the same functionality I had before while using less screen real estate. Maybe I need to start looking at a map to escape VIM….

If you are looking for a lightweight text editor, capable of doing more than editing text but without being in your face about it, give Geany a try. Do take a look at the settings, specially if using a language which cares about whitespace.