Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment (IDE). It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. It supports a fair number of languages (like PHP for example) and has most of the features that you would require from a simple IDE, making it a worthy tool for me to use on my sluggish home desktop PC, in place of the a bit too resource heavy, JAVA-powered NetBeans IDE.
Anyway, the default is for Geany to have a bright white background with a dark foreground, but if you’ve been in the programming game for as long as what I have, then you’ll undoubtedly know that working on a dark background with a light foreground is far superior when it comes to wanting to try and reduce eye-strain brought on by long bouts in front of the screen!
Unfortunately it isn’t immediately apparent how to set a dark background color in Geany, but thankfully the option is there if you just search a little harder:
(From the main menu) Edit -> Preferences -> Editor. Once on the Editor options level, select the Display tab to the far right of the dialog, and you will notice a checkbox marked “Invert syntax highlighting colors”.
Check this and you’ll return to a beautifully black background with a light foreground.
Nifty.