StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. IDE
  5. Geany vs Visual Studio Code

Geany vs Visual Studio Code

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Geany
Geany
Stacks34
Followers56
Votes21
GitHub Stars3.4K
Forks643
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code
Stacks186.5K
Followers169.1K
Votes2.3K
GitHub Stars178.2K
Forks35.9K

Geany vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Geany and Visual Studio Code

Geany and Visual Studio Code are both popular code editors that are used by developers. While they have some similarities, they also have several key differences that set them apart from each other.

  1. User Interface: Geany has a simple and lightweight user interface, making it easy to navigate and use. On the other hand, Visual Studio Code offers a more feature-rich and customizable interface with various themes and extensions available, allowing for a more personalized coding experience.

  2. Supported Languages: Geany supports a wide range of programming languages, including C, C++, Python, and Java, but it may have limited support for some newer or niche languages. On the contrary, Visual Studio Code has extensive language support with built-in IntelliSense and syntax highlighting for a vast number of languages, making it suitable for a broader range of projects.

  3. Extensions and Plugins: Geany has a limited number of extensions and plugins available compared to Visual Studio Code. While Geany does support some useful plugins, Visual Studio Code offers a vast ecosystem of extensions, allowing developers to enhance their coding environment by adding features like Git integration, debugging tools, and language-specific extensions.

  4. Integrated Terminal: Visual Studio Code includes a built-in terminal, which allows developers to execute shell commands without leaving the editor. Geany, on the other hand, lacks this feature, and developers have to rely on external terminal applications for command-line operations.

  5. Code Navigation and Refactoring: Visual Studio Code provides advanced code navigation features, including Go to Definition, Find All References, and code refactoring capabilities like renaming variables and extracting code blocks into functions. Geany has more limited code navigation and refactoring tools, making it less suitable for complex projects with extensive codebases.

  6. Debugging Capabilities: Visual Studio Code offers powerful debugging capabilities with support for multiple programming languages and integrated debugging tools. Geany has limited support for debugging, and developers may need to use external tools or plugins for debugging purposes.

In Summary, while Geany is a lightweight and easy-to-use code editor with support for multiple programming languages, Visual Studio Code provides a more feature-rich and customizable environment with extensive language support, a wide range of extensions, advanced code navigation and debugging capabilities.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Geany, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar
Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M
Comments
Simon
Simon

Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Jan 9, 2020

Decided

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

1.29M views1.29M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Geany
Geany
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code

Geany is a small and lightweight Integrated Development Environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. Another goal was to be as independent as possible from a special Desktop Environment like KDE or GNOME - Geany only requires the GTK2 runtime libraries.

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

syntax highlighting;code completion;auto completion of often used constructs like if, for and while;auto completion of XML and HTML tags;call tips;folding;many supported filetypes like C, Java, PHP, HTML, Python, Perl, Pascal;symbol lists;embedded terminal emulation;extensibility through plugins
Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars
3.4K
GitHub Stars
178.2K
GitHub Forks
643
GitHub Forks
35.9K
Stacks
34
Stacks
186.5K
Followers
56
Followers
169.1K
Votes
21
Votes
2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 6
    Lightweight
  • 5
    Plug-ins
  • 5
    Open-source
  • 3
    Extensive file-type support
  • 2
    Easily changeable
Cons
  • 1
    Less pupular than VS
Pros
  • 341
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 310
    Fast
  • 194
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
Cons
  • 46
    Slow startup
  • 29
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 14
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools

What are some alternatives to Geany, Visual Studio Code?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

PhpStorm

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.

IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA

Out of the box, IntelliJ IDEA provides a comprehensive feature set including tools and integrations with the most important modern technologies and frameworks for enterprise and web development with Java, Scala, Groovy and other languages.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.

WebStorm

WebStorm

WebStorm is a lightweight and intelligent IDE for front-end development and server-side JavaScript.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

PyCharm

PyCharm

PyCharm’s smart code editor provides first-class support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS, popular template languages and more. Take advantage of language-aware code completion, error detection, and on-the-fly code fixes!

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana