Running Geany on macOS (OS X)

The easiest way to get Geany installed on your system is to get the precompiled version available here. The app bundle requires OS X 10.7 (Lion) or higher and a 64-bit CPU. The bundle includes most of the plugins (those not requiring additional dependencies) and color themes.

Geany compilation and creation of the above app bundle using jhbuild is explained in the geany-osx project README.

Note: while MacPorts provides a Geany package, as of this writing the Geany version provided by MacPorts has some major issues (paste not working, infinite loop after using find in files). The current Geany master version already contains fixes for these issues and it is expected that Geany 1.25 will work alright with MacPorts. You can get all dependencies using MacPorts and compile the development Geany version to have fully working Geany under MacPorts.

To have native-looking Geany under OS X, add this to /opt/local/etc/macports/variants.conf:

+no_x11
-x11
+quartz

Then run the following commands:

sudo port install geany
sudo port install gtk2-aurora #optional
sudo port install gtk-chtheme #optional

Note: The gtk2-aurora and gtk-chtheme packages aren't required but they will make Geany look better. After installing, run

gtk-chtheme

and choose gtk2-aurora.

Note: Geany's menu will be inside its main window instead of in the top panel like native applications, so it will feel slightly foreign, but it still works great.

Note: VTE 0.28.2 doesn't work without additional patching so the terminal tab isn't available.

As a bonus, any other GTK+ apps you install with MacPorts will look at least as good as Geany does when installed this way.