Geany-playdate — Playdate support for the ancient artifact known as Geany

SDK Development Discussion
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Hey folks!

I wrote a plugin that drags the ancient artifact known as Geany (yes, it still boots in 2026; yes, it still opens faster than your browser) into the Playdate world.

Some people want a fancy IDE. Some of us just want an editor that opens before the coffee maker finishes and doesn’t eat 2 GB of RAM. Geany is that editor — and by “that editor” I mean it’s been around so long it probably has a Playdate of its own.

What you get

  • Build and Run — one shortcut: pdc + Simulator. No Electron required, no 30-second “Activating extensions…” spinner. Just a menu item like a civilized 2005 workflow.
  • Build / Run / Clean / Open Simulator
  • pdc errors in the Compiler tab — double-click, jump to the line. Geany’s had this Compiler tab since before half of you were writing Lua. It’s old. It works. It is the grandparent of your fancy problem matchers.
  • Preferences for SDK path, source/output (empty = auto-detect), and pdc flags
  • API autocomplete — ~1800 tags for playdate.*, generated from playdate-luacats

Yes, autocomplete. In Geany. The timeline is healing.

It understands the usual MyGame/source/ + pdxinfo layout (and it won’t go looking for source/Source like a confused grandparent — that bug is fixed).

Install (Linux, aka Geany’s natural habitat)

git clone https://github.com/davi19/geany-playdate.git
cd geany-playdate
make && make install

Tools → Plugin Manager → Playdate.

Yes, Geany has a plugin system. It predates VS Code extensions by about a decade. We called it “plugins” before it was cool. Get off my lawn.

F5 = Build and Run (you can rebind it; Geany’s keybinding dialog is also ancient and still fine).

Why Geany?

Because I can:

  • compile a game and open the Simulator before VS Code finishes showing its welcome tab
  • leave Geany open for three weeks without it updating itself into a new UI
  • run it on a laptop that also runs the Playdate Simulator without the fan achieving flight

Also: if your IDE needs 12 extensions to open a .lua file, you don’t have a toolchain, you have a dependency.

Credits

This is a Geany port of the best parts of the VS Code ecosystem — the kids’ table did good research:

Also: official Playdate SDK, Whitebrim and cadin templates.

Repo: GitHub - davi19/geany-playdate · GitHub
GPL-3.0-or-later. Unaffiliated with Panic, but Geany might be affiliated with dirt — it’s that old.

Still missing

  • Debugging (Geany’s debugger plugin is also from the Jurassic; one thing at a time)
  • An AI autocomplete tab (we have a status bar instead; it does one job)

PRs, issues, and “back in my day we used ed” comments are welcome.

Cheers!

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