I like using the Geany IDE, perhaps because it seems more like a nice source code editor than a full-blown IDE. The version of Geany in the repository for Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04, which I use on a couple machines, doesn’t seem to include the Treebrowser plugin that I wanted to try. Might as well take a shot at building the current version from source.

The following steps assume you’ve started a terminal in your home directory.

Get the required packages.

sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf intltool libtool libgtk2.0-dev libglib2.0-dev g++

I’m using a directory named src in my home directory to hold the downloaded source archives.

mkdir src && cd src

Download and extract the Geany source (be sure to check the Geany site to see if there is a more recent version than 0.19.1 referenced here).

wget http://download.geany.org/geany-0.19.1.tar.gz

tar xvf geany-0.19.1.tar.gz

Change to the extracted source directory, configure, build, and install.

cd geany-0.19.1

./autogen.sh

make

sudo make install

If these steps completed without errors you should be able to start Geany by typing geany in the terminal.

Next get the source for the geany-plugins package.

cd ~/src

wget http://plugins.geany.org/geany-plugins/geany-plugins-0.19.tar.gz

tar xvf geany-plugins-0.19.tar.gz

cd geany-plugins-0.19

./configure

You can install all of the plugins by running make and sudo make install in the current directory, or you can install plugins individually from subdirectories configured for each one. The following steps install only the Treebrowser plugin.

cd treebrowser

make

sudo make install

This Ubuntu Forums post pointed me in the right direction for figuring this out.

BTW: Geany is my lazy fallback when the quest to master text surgery in Vim hurts my brain.