title: Beginner help: How I got the Geany terminal to work on Windows 10 (not a question, but probably useful to someone)
body: <p>So yeah, this isn't a question as such. Apologies if Stack has a better place for this kind of post. I just figured I might save some people a bit of future head scratching. </p>
  
  <p>I was running Windows 10. Installed Geany with the standard 'geany-1.36_setup.exe' file for windows. </p>
  
  <p>Opened a new file, 'test.py'. Typed in: </p>
  
  <p><div class="snippet" data-lang="js" data-hide="false" data-console="true" data-babel="false">
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  <pre class="snippet-code-html lang-html prettyprint-override"><code>print('test')</code></pre>
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  </p>
  
  <p>(It's no 'hello world', but hey, I fancied a change.)</p>
  
  <p>And I got the dreaded 'cannot execute' error:</p>
  
  <p><div class="snippet" data-lang="js" data-hide="false" data-console="true" data-babel="false">
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  <pre class="snippet-code-html lang-html prettyprint-override"><code>09:05:16: Cannot execute build command "-e /bin/sh "C:\Program Files (x86)\Geany\libexec\geany\geany-run-helper" "C:\Users\donenmax\Desktop\python" 0 python "test.py"": The system cannot find the file specified. Check the Terminal setting in Preferences</code></pre>
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  </p>
  
  <p>So I did what any beginner would do: I googled. </p>
  
  <p>Naturally, I started off searching for what to put in the Terminal Setting of preferences. Everyone seemed to have a different answer. What doesn't help is that: <br><br>
  1)A lot of people don't use the default terminal for various reasons, so their guidance won't work without a lot of mods. (To be fair, the default terminal ain't the best for certain work). <br><br>
  2)The default terminal setting, 'x-term-emulator' appears, from what my little brain can figure out, to be a linux command. Maybe other people have got it to work on Windows, I dunno. But the closest answers I got to changing this to something Windows could understand were along the lines of 'oh, you'll need cmd.exe, but I've no idea what switches you will need.'
  <br><br>
  Sorry, beginner here...what the heck is a switch? 
  Well, it turns out that the '-e /bin/sh' entry that follows the 'x-term-emulator' text is, guess what, a linux command (or not something Windows understands, anyhow.) </p>
  
  <p>Note: the '%c' command that follows 'sh' should not be removed, as this is substituted with the run script name. Basically, %c tells Geany what script to execute. </p>
  
  <p>So then, going into 'Preferences' and accessing the 'Terminal' setting, I replaced </p>
  
  <p><div class="snippet" data-lang="js" data-hide="false" data-console="true" data-babel="false">
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  <pre class="snippet-code-html lang-html prettyprint-override"><code>x-terminal-emulator -e /bin/sh %c</code></pre>
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  <p>with</p>
  
  <p><div class="snippet" data-lang="js" data-hide="false" data-console="true" data-babel="false">
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  <pre class="snippet-code-html lang-html prettyprint-override"><code>cmd.exe /Q /C %c </code></pre>
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  </p>
  
  <p>That got me as far as a blank terminal. Wooo! So, how to actually get anything to be executed?</p>
  
  <p>More googling. </p>
  
  <p>You have to go into the 'Build' tab, then select 'Set Build Commands'. </p>
  
  <p>You will (or should) find something like: </p>
  
  <pre class="lang-html prettyprint-override"><code>C:\Users\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38-32\
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><div class="snippet" data-lang="js" data-hide="false" data-console="true" data-babel="false">
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  <pre class="snippet-code-html lang-html prettyprint-override"><code>python "%f"</code></pre>
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  </p>
  
  <p>You'll need to replace 'python' with wherever python.exe is stored on your machine. Just type 'python.exe' into the Windows search bar, then right click 'open file location'. </p>
  
  <p>In my case, I replaced 'python "%f" with:</p>
  
  <p><div class="snippet" data-lang="js" data-hide="false" data-console="true" data-babel="false">
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  <pre class="snippet-code-html lang-html prettyprint-override"><code>C:\Users\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38-32\python</code></pre>
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  <p>Boom! My terminal now works fine. </p>
  
  <p>Apologies for making this a rather long post, but this was the result of about an hour's brow furrowing that is most likely shared with beginners in similar situations. Hopefully this will help some of you windows users out there. A lot of programming guidance I've come across seems to assume pretty hefty background knowledge :) </p>