For what it's worth:

I googled gedit and got the impression that it has a history of compilation
difficulties often related to getting gnome heading information correct or complete.

gedit takes up about 4.4 Mb, geany takes up about 11 Mb; neither number
is a significant determiner in a 10 Gb system.

geany has its admirers; among these are:
https://linuxtidbits.wordpress.com/2...dit-to-geany/; and
http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/CodeHacking/Geany/.

Personally, I use leafpad for notes to myself, or composing off-line forum posts,
and geany when I am trying to read some 'serious' code.