Geany

[InfoLibre]

Why not replacing xed by Geany and contributing to Geany? It would be better than continuing to waste time on xed. Geany is installed by default in Raspberry Pi OS. It’s a very more performant text editor than xed and can be used as easily as xed if you parameter it with minimalist menus.

[Jopp-gh]

Admitted, I'm not into Linux app development but use vsCode almost daily.

Geany is, as far as I can remember a very old app, so I'm wondering why people sticks to these oldies instead to switch to much better tools like the latest and much better Vscode?
There's also a telemetry free version of vscode.
Vscode offers all kind of extensions so you can code anything with ease.

Anyway I agree, Geany would be a better app than xEd. Probably xed is the default, because it's so generic and ideal for simple and very quick edits or previews of text files or similar.

I answered more for curiously than to give an answer. Still, vsCode is great.

[Secret-chest]

VSCode's UI is not native, it is web-based. The interface often behaves confusingly unlike all other apps, like with the command palette.

[Jopp-gh]

Vscode might be confusing at first, but you don't have to use all of its commands. The more you use this IDE, the more you want to learn more, mastering Vscode, step by step.

Also, its web-based services aren't mandatory, except for downloading plugins. So it's basically a local app and there's a telemetry free version too, otherwise I'd refrain to suggest this tool.

Finally, it shouldn't matter if its framework is web-based but that's my opinion. The interface is the same on multiple platforms, which is a bonus too.

[eht16]

Geany is, as far as I can remember a very old app, so I'm wondering why people sticks to

What does this say?
Geany is still developed, not as actively as we would wish but it's not dead or so. The fact that it exists since almost 20 years already, is nothing bad per se.

[mtwebster]

It will be a cold day in hell before we replace any default app with something that uses Electron.

I think we looked at Geany years ago and found it difficult to turn off enough of the UI to have it default as a simple editor. I haven't tried it lately, however.

[Qronikarz]

I don't particularly care what the default text editor is gonna be in Mint because that's not a big issue, but I tried to turn off as many elements as you could in Geany since I do use it often and it is always installed on my OS.

I just used what available in options and the view tab. The theme I use is Darcula since it's "dark" and matches the Mint look well. It's flatpak version of Geany so maybe there can be some differences if you want to build it yourself to include it in the Mint.

[Jopp-gh]

Agreed, a framework like Electron isn't ideal, also me would prefer another framework but it works, which is more important.

Vscode might be too much for a quick editor app and for the common user too. So, I'm OK with Xed as text editor.

[Heavygrass]

The best simple editor I found is Kate.
No need to turn off anything in GUI and has lots of features.

[InfoLibre]

Kate and Geany are indeed the most powerful text editors. But Kate is rather nested into KDE, isn't it?

[Heavygrass]

I use it with Cinnamon all the time (did not require any special setup).
With dark theme specifically there might be things that could be improved I guess, I didn't meditate on that though.
Possibly I had to choose dark theme manually, don't remember honestly.

I tried both Kate and Geany, and Kate is much easier to use as text editor out of the box.

[eht16]

@mtwebster
Geany has a feature to read a system-wide configuration file initally when there is no user configuration yet, by default from /usr/local/share/geany but for Linux Mint it is probably /usr/share/geany/ when it uses /usr as prefix.

For details, see https://geany.org/manual/#global-configuration-file.

An example file to hide the sidbar, toolbar and messages window looks like:

[geany]
sidebar_visible=false
msgwindow_visible=false
pref_toolbar_show=false

color_scheme=darcula.conf

The Linux Mint Geany package could create this file upon installation and new users will be greeted with a very clean interface.

Maybe this is already enough?

P.S.: I personally find it a bit sad to hide so much of Geany's functionality and some users might never find the potential Geany has. But this is just my personal opinion (I'm heavily biased here :D). I do see your intention.

[InfoLibre]

Geany can open very very big files, Kate can't.