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, e.g.:

GTK+ runtime for Windows 2000 and newer: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gtk-win/gtk2-runtime-2.16.1-2009-04-21-ash.exe

• GTK+ 2.16 is the most stable at the time of writing - if you have a higher version you should check the release notes to see if there are problems e.g. with theming.

• Since Geany 0.16, GTK+ >= 2.8 is required, which in turn requires at least Windows 2000 or newer. The official Windows builds of Geany are built against GTK+ 2.16, so

to use them you also need GTK+ 2.16 or newer.

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

Some features are missing:

• build support (implemented but might be still buggy)
• embedded terminal emulation (VTE, as far as I know there is nothing equal for Windows)

The Build system support on Windows has been improved in the past but it is still not as good as on other platforms. Currently, build commands are executed synchronous on Windows, that is, while the command is being executed, Geany won't respond to user interactions and its user interface won't redraw, i.e. it seems to be frozen. Once the executed command has finished, the Geany main window becomes responsive again.

FYI, the original announcement for the Geany 0.7 Windows build (mostly outdated): http://lists.uvena.de/pipermail/geany/2006-June/000134.html

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