Notes

Customizing Geany colorschemes and syntax highlighting

an overview of what is reuired in order to change the colors. Where the files are, what the code means and where to save everything etc.

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Workflow
2 minutes

File paths

  • System-wide config files are in /usr/share/geany
  • USer-specific config files are in $HOME/.config/geany
  • Files placed in the user-specific folder will overwrite the code in files placed in the syste-specific folder
  • Don’t make changes directly in the system files, those will be overwritten when Geany is updated

File names and extensions

  • The general colorscheme for the editor is a .conf file in the colorschemes directory. For example: monokai.conf
  • The programming language specific file is a filetypes.ext file where .ext is your programming language extension. For example, filetypes.markdown for Markdown, filetypes.js for JavaScript and filetypes.sh for Bash files. These files placed in /$HOME/.config/geany/filedefs/ will overwrite the code in default files placed in /usr/share/geany/.

Making changes

  • Colors can be HEX values, prepended with either a # or a 0x. For example: #ff0000 or #f00 or 0xFF0000 are all valid values for Red.
  • You can save all your colors as named variables under the [named_colors] section
 1[named_colors]
 2color_navy=#0C1021
 3color_orange=#FF6400
 4color_light=#ECF0F1
 5color_red=#FF0000
 6color_mustard=#FFCB4F
 7color_blue=#79b6e8
 8color_pink=#DB0A5B
 9color_yellow=#ffff06
10color_green=0x7EB35B
11color_teal=#16a085
12
13[styling]
14# key=foreground;background;bold;italic
15# bold and italic are true/false flags, i.e. boolean values (false is default)
16
17default=color_light;color_navy
18strong=color_mustard;color_navy;true;false
  • The styling takes 4 values for every key. The values are:
    • Foreground color (takes a named color or a HEX value)
    • Background color (takes a named color or a HEX value)
    • Bold (takes a true/false value)
    • Italic (takes a true/false value)

Below are all valid ways of writing the values

1[styling]
2default=#ECF0F1;#0C1021
3strong=0xFFCB4F;0x0C1021;true
4emphasis=color_mustard;color_navy;false;true
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