General
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## General

### Startup

At startup, Geany loads the first 15 files from the last time Geany was launched. You can disable this feature in the preferences dialog(see Figure 3.2, “General tab in preferences dialog”). If you specify some files on the command line, only these files will be opened, but you can find the files from the last session in the file menu under the "Recent files" item. This contains the last 15 recently opened files. It may be that Geany loads not exactly 15 session files, this depends on the compile time option GEANY_SESSION_FILES; the default is 15. For details see the section called “Compile time options”.

### Detection of a running instance

Geany detects an already running instance of itself and opens new files in the already running one. So, you can use Geany like an editor to view and edit files by opening them from other programs. If you do not like this for some reason, you can disable it with the appropriate command line option.

In the case that Geany crashed, you will get a message dialog at the next start, which asks you whether to delete an existing named pipe. If you are sure that there is no other instance of Geany is running, you can say Yes and Geany will start as usual. Otherwise click No and Geany will not start.

### Global C tags

If a C file (with extension .c, .cpp, .h, etc.) is opened, a global tags file is loaded once, which contains many function declarations from glibc and some other libraries, like X, Bonobo, Gnome, GTK, Glib and so on. These declarations are used for call tips and auto completion. These tags are only useful if you are writing C or C++ source code, so if you know that you do not need these things, you can skip loading this tag file. To do so, start Geany with the argument "-n" or "--no-ctags", for more information see the section called “Command line options”.

### Virtual terminal emulator widget (VTE)

If you have installed `libvte.so` in your system, it is loaded automatically by Geany, and you will have a terminal widget in the notebook at the bottom.

If Geany cannot find `libvte.so` at startup, the terminal widget will not be loaded. So there is no need to install the package containing this file in order to run Geany. Additionally, you can disable the use of the terminal widget by command line option, for more information see the section called “Command line options”.

You can use this terminal (from now on called VTE) nearly as an usual terminal program like xterm. There is basic clipboard support. You can paste the contents of the clipboard by pressing the right mouse button to open the popup menu and choosing Paste. To copy text from the VTE, just select the desired text and then press the right mouse button and choose Copy from the popup menu. On systems running the X Window System you can paste the last selected text by pressing the middle mouse button in the VTE (on 2-button mice, the middle button can often be simulated by pressing both mouse buttons together).

### Note

Geany tries to load `libvte.so`. If this fails, it tries to load `libvte.so.4`. If this fails too, you should check whether you installed libvte correctly. Again, Geany also runs without this library.

It could be, that the library is called something else than `libvte.so.4` (e.g. on FreeBSD 6.0 it is called `libvte.so.8`). So please set a link to the correct file (as root).

    # ln -s /usr/lib/libvte.so.X /usr/lib/libvte.so.4

Obviously, you have to adjust the paths and set X to the number of your `libvte.so`.

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