Geany 2.1 Released with New Filetypes & LSP Plugin (Ubuntu PPA)

After more than one and half year of development, the free open-source geany text editor released new major 2.1 version!

The new release of this lightweight IDE is named “Yage”. It added geany-themes, the separated color schemes in built-in.

Meaning users can now easily change the color scheme from “View” menu, without downloading & installing the themes manually.

The release also added many new filetypes support, including Lexer (CIL), Dart, Dockerfile, LESS and SCSS, Nix, Prolog, Raku (Perl 6), SystemVerilog, Terraform HCL, TOML, Zig.

It added symbols support for Ocaml, Meson and Forth filetypes, updated Fortran, Java, JavaScript, PowerShell, and Verilog keywords, and improved support for mixed PHP/HTML/JavaScript symbols, Erlang symbols, Nim and Shell highlighting inside string.

Geany 2.1 also introduced new LSP plugin. It’s a language server protocol client plugin that allows to run multiple language servers for various programming languages, making their functionality accessible to Geany. See the official Doc for how to configure and use the plugin.

For more lightweight code editors, check out our [review of GNOME Text Editor].

Other changes in the 2.1 release include:

• Support for searching the Messages and Compiler output.
• Use system specific native file chooser dialog.
• New filter for keybindings in preferences dialog.
• New filter for open documents sidebar item.
• Recognize .lpr as Pascal, .mjs, .cjs and .jsx as JavaScript, .mts, .cts and .tsx as TypeScript, .pyi as Python, and .tmpl and .vue as HTML.

For more, see the official release note.

How to Install Geany 2.1

Geany provides official packages for Windows and macOS, along with source tarball they are available to download at the link below:

For Linux, there’s so far NO official package from the developer team. Besides building from source, you may choose the Flatpak package (not updated at the moment of writing) that runs in sandbox.

And, Ubuntu users may choose the unofficial PPA that contains Geany 2.1 for Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, 24.10 and 25.04.

Just open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run the commands below one by one to add PPA & install package:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/geany

sudo apt update

sudo apt install geany geany-plugins

Uninstall:

To downgrade Geany, install ppa-purge and use the tool to purge PPA which will downgrade all the installed packages from it:

sudo apt install ppa-purge && sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/geany

Or, run the command to manually uninstall the text editor:

sudo apt remove --autoremove geany geany-common geany-plugins-common

Then remove the PPA repository via command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/geany