Geany vs TeXworks

Geany is a free, lightweight integrated development environment for Linux, macOS, and Windows. It provides syntax highlighting, code completion, call tips, and code folding for languages and file types including C, Java, PHP, HTML, Python, Perl, and Pascal. An embedded terminal emulator is included, and plugins can extend the editor. Geany supports macro recording and column editing, but not multi-cursor editing. The project distributes it under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. Linux, BSD, and similar systems are directed toward distribution packages, including packages named for Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu. Prebuilt Windows and macOS binaries are available from geany.org, along with links to additional third-party packages and a portable Windows version. Building from source requires GTK3 libraries and headers, dependency libraries, and C and C++ compilers. Geany has no free trial because the listed plan is free.

TeXworks is a free desktop application for authoring TeX, LaTeX and ConTeXt documents on Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux. Its Unicode-based, TeX-aware editor is intended to be accessible to casual and non-technical users, with syntax highlighting, auto-completion, spell-checking, templates, search and replace, and support for multiple encodings. An integrated PDF viewer synchronizes source and preview through SyncTeX. In the 0.6.x series, the viewer also has continuous scrolling, two-page view, text selection and copying, and a ruler. The usual workflow uses pdfTeX or XeTeX to produce PDFs, and DVI output can be configured. Users can configure TeX commands and run BibTeX or Makeindex; scripting support includes QtScript, Lua and Python. Typesetting requires a separate TeX distribution such as TeX Live or MiKTeX. The project lists Windows installers, macOS disk images and GNU/Linux packages. TeXworks is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version at the user's option.