I try to switch to dark themes on as many parts of my computing workflow as possible.

The desktop environment, my applications -- I try to make it all dark.

Why? It's easy on the eyes.

I'll go into my full dark-theme setup later, but for now I'd like to share my discovery of the dark themes in the Geany text editor.

I didn't think Geany had themes, let alone dark themes. Turns out it has both.

And I've been using Geany a whole lot because a) copy/paste of text with Windows-style line endings is broken in Gedit (it comes out Unix style) and b) I'm using Geany to work on my Java code because it will compile and run it right in the editor.

I found a link to the Geany Themes site on GitHub. I downloaded the whole thing as a .zip file (I probably should just use git to fork it onto my local drive), then dropped the colorschemes directory into my own ~/.config/geany directory (making it ~/.config/geany/colorschemes) and then in Geany I could choose a Color Scheme under View - Change Color Scheme in the application's menu.

Right now I using the Monokai color scheme.

All I need to do now is figure out how to execute either a Perl or Go program and get the output into the editor (like I do with Gedit Snippets), and I can use Geany instead of Gedit to write this blog's entries, which include a script-generated timestamp for Ode's Indexette add-in.

Update: It is possible to insert a custom-formatted date into your file in Geany under Edit - Insert Date - Use Custom Date Format, using Edit - Insert Date - Set Custom Date Format to set it. For my Ode datestamp I used tag : Indexette : index-date : %Y %m %d %T. Unfortunately it outputs the date in my local timezone instead of UTC, which is what I use in my Ode site. I don't see any way of making the "Custom Date Format" output UTC, so this makes Geany that much less useful for the purpose of writing for Ode.

I tried the Mini-Script plugin, but that is cumbersome, and I even overwrote one of my scripts on accident because of its less-than-ideal user interface.

In short, there's nothing in Geany like Gedit's Snippets plugin, which is ideal (and makes Gedit itself ideal) for writing Ode entries.