I still use Geany for Ruby development, and I have used it for Perl, Java and even C++. The worst part of my first (and so far only) CS class wasn't that it was

I still use Geany for Ruby development, and I have used it for Perl, Java and even C++. The worst part of my first (and so far only) CS class wasn't that it was in C++, but (for me and pretty much all in the class) grokking what Microsoft Visual Studio (and huge IDEs in general) were all about, and how to use them. It was a huge, unnecessary hurdle. All you really need in a CS class is to be able to write your code, compile and run it, and Geany does that very well for many languages. I've never been able to do that with JavaScript/Node -- that's one language that I haven't gotten working (as far as running it from within the editor). One thing that didn't work so well for me was indentation/code formatting. When you first write it in Geany, it looks good, but once you star messing with the code, the indents can go haywire, and as far as I know there is no way to automatically re-format the code. That's where a "real" IDE comes in, I guess.