Running Geany on Windows

This site is about how to run Geany on Windows and what is different from other platforms.

To run Geany under Windows you may need to install the GTK+ runtime libraries, depending how you installed Geany. If you use the official full installer, a recent GTK+ runtime is included and you don't need any additional software.

If not using the full installer, you need to install a GTK+ runtime environment. The best way is to use the MSYS2 project which provides all necessary dependencies to build and run Geany on Windows coupled with a comfortable package manager.

Information on how to build Geany from source yourself on Windows can be found on Build Geany on Windows (using MSYS2)

(The Geany Windows executable can be downloaded from the Geany website.)

Some features are missing:

• embedded terminal emulation (VTE, as far as we know there is nothing equal for Windows)

Geany does not include any developer tools such as compilers or interpreters, as we want to keep it lightweight. You will need to install these separately.

Grep is needed for “Find in Files” functionality.

• version 2.4.2 via UnxUtils - The present recommendation in the Geany manual.
• version 2.5.4 via GnuWin - Confirmed to work on Windows 7, with Geany 1.22. Allows use of the valuable –exclude-dir option.

For the below, download the 'Automated MinGW Installer' program from Minimal GNU for Windows, as it is harder to install each tool separately:

• gcc
• g++ (g++ requires gcc)
• make