Customizing Geany colorschemes and syntax highlighting

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workflow/geany_colorschemes.md
Aug 08, 2018
Workflow

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
[named_colors]
color_navy=#0C1021
color_orange=#FF6400
color_light=#ECF0F1
color_red=#FF0000
color_mustard=#FFCB4F
color_blue=#79b6e8
color_pink=#DB0A5B
color_yellow=#ffff06
color_green=0x7EB35B
color_teal=#16a085

[styling]
# key=foreground;background;bold;italic
# bold and italic are true/false flags, i.e. boolean values (false is default)

default=color_light;color_navy
strong=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

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