Geany?
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Helix was mentioned in a few posts but no link so here : https://helix-editor.com/
If you love the terminal, it's fantastic. I like it better than NeoVIM but, admittedly, I didn't spend a lot of time trying to get to know nvim. It's much better than VIM for code because it was built for that, not "just" a text editor that got forced into IDE service. (Not to denigrate VI/VIM, I love them, but Helix is more powerful for dev related tasks). If you hate the terminal... keep moving, nothing to see here.
For a more common IDE (not terminal), I've been using Theia for the past 6 months or so : https://theia-ide.org/ If you click that link you'll see "AI" vomited into everything, for example the first two sentences :
The Theia IDE is a modern, AI-native IDE for cloud and desktop built on the Theia Platform. The Theia Platform is a framework for building custom, AI-native tools & IDEs.
From what I've seen, there's no AI integration in the base and it's only added via extensions. It is extremely similar to VS Code but is not a fork. Now... whether or not it was ""developed with AI"", I don't know. I kind of got the feeling that they sprayed "AI" all over the website to try to cash in on the hype and get new users.
Even if that's the case (chasing the hype train, no actual LLM inside), that's likely to be a major turn off for you which I fully understand.
Have you heard of the lazyvim config for neovim?
OK, yeah, this makes it a bit easier to tackle the learning curve of vim. Thanks, I'll give this a go.
Someone is working on a list: https://codeberg.org/small-hack/open-slopware#editors
Maybe? https://lap.dev/lapce/
People are recommending vim but unfortunately the lead maintainers are now slopcoders. Evi is a fork from before the brainrot set in https://codeberg.org/NerdNextDoor/evi
gedit
Emacs Makes All Computing Simple.
OP said IDE, not operating system...
OP said gentler, not please destroy my pinky (jokes aside emacs is great but there's a lot to configure)
You obviously mean Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping, no?
Kate
Maybe Gram (a Zed fork). And VSCodium as a popular choice but ultimately that's Microsoft. But there's a bazillion code editors in any Linux repository, some more general, some very good at a specific programming language.
Perhaps the KDE one, KDevelop, or maybe Eclipse. In the terminal I'd recommend Helix. It's sort of like vim but with more intuitive controls (personal opinion, don't kill me), and the functionality is built in to the core program rather than relying on many plugins. You only have to add an LSP server for code completion/popover documentation, just like VSCode
Yes, Eclipse. 20-year-ago me would have a stroke saying that (due to it being pretty 'heavyweight' for the PCs back then) but it's got support for any language you can think of with plugins and an app store for everything. But, no AI crap unless you seek it out, I presume.
It's been a few years (not many, just a few) but last I used eclipse it was clunky, slow and cumbersome for everything you wanted to do. Even relatively simple tasks ended up being tedious. Finding any option or feature usually required Google.
It also loved crashing, a lot.
I remember running Eclipse with 1GB of RAM 😭
Eclipse definitely earned its hate for a long time, but it's heaviness waned more and more as systems got faster and had more ram. By the time I stopped using it, it was practically snappy and that was over ten years ago. That being said, I'm not exactly excited to jump back into it.
I'm still going to recommend Vim.
Have you tried typing vimtutor to your terminal emulator and press enter?
I also did a quick search and found this interactive tutorial website of Vim.
https://openvim.com/
You won't have many choices, VS Codium (VS Code fork), KDevelop, Eclipse and NetBeans.
Kakoune, Helix, Kate