Wingide is a beautiful application

[vinjvinj]

I haven't used an IDE in a long time but gave wing ide a try because
I wanted the same development platform on Linux and Windows.

I'm currently using Ultraedit and it works fine but needed something
more portable as I'm moving my main platform over to Ubuntu. I first
tried jedit and was reasonably happy with it but it felt slow and it
did not have a native look and feel to it. It was really hard on the
eyes.

I was impressed! The UI has completely changed since the last time I
gave it a spin. It's much more useable and beautiful on the eyes. My
productivity has gone up for sure and would highly recomend it to
anyone else. not to mention you'll be supporting python as well.

Things I like about wingide:
- Ability to double click on the project plan and it hides and you
double click on it and it becomes visable again.
- Ability to double click on the debug/python shell plan and it hides
and you double click on it and it becomes visable again.
- Auto completion is very powerful and well implemented.
- Open the file that a function was defined through the context menu
- Keyboard mapping for vi and emacs
- Always having a python shell available
- An integrated debugger.
- Running in debug mode was significantly faster than any other
debugger I have used.
- Auto indent mode is vary useful.
- The space manager. Notifies you if a file contains spaces and tabs
and then converts all tabs into spaces.
- Ability to debug my cherrypy and turbogears application

Things that could use improvement:
- The block mode Ability to work with text files in block mode where
you can highlight any block in the file. Wingide implementation is
reasonable but not like Ultraedit's or jedit's

Does anyone know what gui toolkit wingide uses? it really is one of the
best applications I've seen for some time and it's a great way to
support python.

[Sybren Stuvel]

vinjvinj enlightened us with:

I haven't used an IDE in a long time but gave wing ide a try because
I wanted the same development platform on Linux and Windows.
I use gvim for that :)
- Ability to double click on the project plan and it hides and you
double click on it and it becomes visable again.
How do you double-click on something that's hidden?
- Keyboard mapping for vi and emacs
VI keyboard mapping! I like :)
- Always having a python shell available
I have a Python shell on my PDA, always available :))
- The space manager. Notifies you if a file contains spaces and tabs
and then converts all tabs into spaces.

And what if you want to use tabs?

Sybren
--
The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a
capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the
safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
Frank Zappa

[Steve Holden]

Sybren Stuvel wrote:

vinjvinj enlightened us with:

I haven't used an IDE in a long time but gave wing ide a try because
I wanted the same development platform on Linux and Windows.

I use gvim for that :)

- Ability to double click on the project plan and it hides and you
double click on it and it becomes visable again.

How do you double-click on something that's hidden?

- Keyboard mapping for vi and emacs

VI keyboard mapping! I like :)

- Always having a python shell available

I have a Python shell on my PDA, always available :))

- The space manager. Notifies you if a file contains spaces and tabs
and then converts all tabs into spaces.

And what if you want to use tabs?

Then you configure it to use tabs. It's a user setting.

regards
Steve
--
Steve Holden [phone] [phone]
Holden Web LLC www.holdenweb.com
PyCon TX 2006 www.python.org/pycon/

[James]

>> I haven't used an IDE in a long time but gave wing ide a try because

I wanted the same development platform on Linux and Windows. I'm currently using Ultraedit and it works fine but needed something
more portable as I'm moving my main platform over to Ubuntu. I first
tried jedit and was reasonably happy with it but it felt slow and it
did not have a native look and feel to it. It was really hard on the
eyes.
Then you owe it to yourself to also try SPE, PyDev and Boa Constructor
(got off to a slow start, but it looks promising now). All are free,
open source, cross platform, native look and feel and support more or
less the features you list.
Does anyone know what gui toolkit wingide uses? it really is one of the
best applications I've seen for some time and it's a great way to
support python.

GTK.

Two minor peeves about WingIDE.
1.) Not native look and feel.
2.) Auto List members implementation is great. But what about call
tips? Just as important and every other Python IDE has it.

[Claudio Grondi]

vinjvinj wrote:

I haven't used an IDE in a long time but gave wing ide a try because
I wanted the same development platform on Linux and Windows.

I'm currently using Ultraedit and it works fine but needed something
more portable as I'm moving my main platform over to Ubuntu. This is also where I intend to go, except going for Wing, which is in my
eyes currently no alternative to Ultra Edit as an overall text editor on
Windows ( I am tired of using two or more editors at the same time as I
do when working with Microsoft Visual C++ and want the features of both
Ultra Edit and the Visual Studio IDE ).

- Wing does not have a ruler showing the current column
- Wing has a slow graphics output on Windows (also on Linux?)
- Wing GUI needs adaptation to its logic (e.g. there is no view menue
item). I have to admit, that Ultra Edit GUI is also not good, so both
need some adaptation efforts from the user.
- Wing does not support column mode (as you already said)
- Wing text editing is based on Scintilla and there are many other
powerful and free editors built upon Scintilla available.
- Wing does not support HTML editing by providing separate HTML toolbar
as the last versions of UltraEdit do.

The only thing what makes a difference to me is, that Wing 'understands'
Python code what results in features not available elsewhere (e.g. go to
definition). I don't know if UltraEdit in its Studio version does
similar things - I suppose it does, but I will be surprized if also for
Python - is there anyone who works with it?

The problem with deciding to use Wing on Linux is, that I am switching
to Linux because of its Open Source at no cost feature, so I don't
actually want to spend any money on proprietary software using Linux.
But because there is no Ultra Edit on Linux it can happen, that I have
to reconsider my attitude when actually fully on Linux. But this will
maybe be never the case, as Windows appears to me as a much more
powerful system and Linux comes in only in order to save money (when it
is possible to use Python/Linux for running ready developed Python
applications) on on multiple Windows licenses in case of using more than
one PC.

Why do you go for Ubuntu, not for Mandriva if you are ready to pay money
beeing on Linux?

I first tried jedit and was reasonably happy with it but it felt slow and it
did not have a native look and feel to it. It was really hard on the
eyes.

I was impressed! The UI has completely changed since the last time I
gave it a spin. It's much more useable and beautiful on the eyes. My
productivity has gone up for sure and would highly recomend it to
anyone else. not to mention you'll be supporting python as well.

Things I like about wingide:
- Ability to double click on the project plan and it hides and you
double click on it and it becomes visable again.
- Ability to double click on the debug/python shell plan and it hides
and you double click on it and it becomes visable again.
- Auto completion is very powerful and well implemented.
- Open the file that a function was defined through the context menu
- Keyboard mapping for vi and emacs
- Always having a python shell available
- An integrated debugger.
- Running in debug mode was significantly faster than any other
debugger I have used.
- Auto indent mode is vary useful.
- The space manager. Notifies you if a file contains spaces and tabs
and then converts all tabs into spaces.
- Ability to debug my cherrypy and turbogears application

Things that could use improvement:
- The block mode Ability to work with text files in block mode where
you can highlight any block in the file. Wingide implementation is
reasonable but not like Ultraedit's or jedit's As Wing uses Scintilla I don't expect it to support column mode before
Scintilla does.
What about editing large (100 MByte and more) text files? I have
uninstalled Wing already, but I suppose, that it will run into problems
when loading large files what I have experienced longer time ago using
Scintilla.

Claudio
Does anyone know what gui toolkit wingide uses? it really is one of the
best applications I've seen for some time and it's a great way to
support python.

[Jonathan Ellis]

James wrote:

I haven't used an IDE in a long time but gave wing ide a try because
I wanted the same development platform on Linux and Windows.

Then you owe it to yourself to also try SPE, PyDev and Boa Constructor
(got off to a slow start, but it looks promising now). All are free,
open source, cross platform, native look and feel and support more or
less the features you list.
In my experience Boa Constructor isn't worth bothering with. It's far
too bugy for practical use.
Two minor peeves about WingIDE.
1.) Not native look and feel.
Well... GTK is as native as anything else, on Linux. Even on Windows
GTK apps seem to be spreading; I've been using GIMP and GAIM long
enough that I guess "not quite native" doesn't bug me anymore.
2.) Auto List members implementation is great. But what about call
tips? Just as important and every other Python IDE has it.

Wing shows calltip info in the Source Assistant panel. (Pro version
only, IIRC.)

-Jonathan

[Shalabh Chaturvedi]

> James wrote:

2.) Auto List members implementation is great. But what about call
tips? Just as important and every other Python IDE has it.

Jonathan Ellis wrote:
Wing shows calltip info in the Source Assistant panel. (Pro version
only, IIRC.)

However it's not as useful as call tips. You have to switch to that tab.
I tend to switch fairly often to another tab like Search or the Python
Shell. Every time I need the assistant, I have to switch the tab again.

It does step through Quixote PTL in debug mode, which is pretty cool.

Shalabh

[vinjvinj]

I have the debug and the python shell just below the editor and the
project and the source assistent on the right pane. You don't have to
swtich tabs when you search or go to the python shell this way. The
source assistant tab is always visible. Since I did not configure it in
any special way, I assume that this is the default configuration.

[sjdevnull]

Claudio Grondi wrote:

The only thing what makes a difference to me is, that Wing 'understands'
Python code what results in features not available elsewhere (e.g. go to
definition).

This is something that pretty much any reasonable programming editor
will get you. Vim and emacs both do it.

I get the feeling that a ot of people working with heavy IDEs don't
realize how capable vim/emacs are, so I'll give a brief rundown of what
my Vim environment does for me. (I do Python web development)--if you
don't like the Vi keybindings, the Cream package is Vim that behaves
like a regular modeless editor but with all of vim's power (and a nice
embedded Python interpreter for writing extensions):

1. Python syntax checking: as I'm typing along, if I input a syntax
error then the line is immediately highlighted in red. Useful for
catching brainos like:
if a=1:
(which will highlight in red when I hit enter, point out that I need ==
instead of =).
2. Normal tag-jump stuff: Ctrl-click on a function/method call (or
class or whatever) will jump to the function/method/class definition
(Ctrl-T works as well if you don't like clicking). It keeps a stack of
visited files so you can drill down through your call stack and then
pop back up to where you came from.
3. Python class browsing stuff: A Class menu shows the parent and child
classes of the one you're currently in, and all the methods of the
current class; selecting any of the above jumps to the appropriate file
and line.
4. Interactive documentation stuff: When I type an open-paren, it looks
to see what the prior keyword is and displays help for it in the status
line (preferring Python documentation, then docstrings, then comments
before the function/method/class definition). Even if there's no
help/comments, it'll show the arguments that the function takes. So
if, say, I type:

cmp(

then the status line displays:

cmp(x, y) Compare the two objects X and Y and return an integer
according to ...

If I hit F1 it'll show the full help text. Often the arguments are
enough, and I find the status-line display a lot less intrusive than
many on-the-fly help systems I've seen.

5. A client menu selects which client I want to work in (so, say, I get
a bug report for Client A, I select them from the menu). The Class
menu and other functions respect this (if I'm in the generic Company
class, the Class menu will list Client A's Company subclass before the
subclasses of other companies; if I jump to the Company definition,
it'll go to Company A's client-specific version). It also restarts
development httpd servers on the current machine running with conf
files appropriate to that client.
6. Full version control integration, including side-by-side diff
viewing/editing, etc
7. Editor control on uncaught errors; if I hit a web page on my
development httpd and it throws an uncaught exception, my editor will
jump to the line the exception occured at (preferring a location in the
stack that's in a file I'm currently editing).and I'll have the stack
trace in a scratch buffer if I want it, or as I jump up/down the stack
it'll show relevant parts of the trace in the status line.

There's a lot I'm forgetting, but the basic point is that even "simple"
text editors like vim can easily do a lot of Python-specific niceties
for you (emacs is similarly capable).

[Claudio Grondi]

sj*******@yahoo .com wrote:

Claudio Grondi wrote:

The only thing what makes a difference to me is, that Wing 'understands'
Python code what results in features not available elsewhere (e.g. go to
definition) .

This is something that pretty much any reasonable programming editor
will get you. Vim and emacs both do it.

I get the feeling that a ot of people working with heavy IDEs don't
realize how capable vim/emacs are, so I'll give a brief rundown of what
my Vim environment does for me. (I do Python web development)--if you
don't like the Vi keybindings, the Cream package is Vim that behaves
like a regular modeless editor but with all of vim's power (and a nice
embedded Python interpreter for writing extensions):

I have tried Vim already multiple times in the past and it had always
problems. But what was in the past must not stay this way forever, so I
have got the latest download at

http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sou...m-6-3-90-1.exe

and installed it loading my current Python file.

With [Strg]-[End] I went to the end of the file where I wanted to
continue editing, but the syntax highlighting told me there is no code
but only a comment. I checked it and found out, that Vim is apparently
not able to do proper highlighting when jumping to the end of the file
not going through other parts of the code before.
Going back to the point where triple quotes comment begun (quite in the
middle of the file) and back to the end did the trick to get proper
highlighting again.
Apparently Vim syntax highlighting analyses only the code it has already
'seen' within the editing window. This is not what I expect from a
mature editor.
I have stopped here, because I found this problem after three seconds of
using it, so imagine how much other problems will become apparent after
using it three hours, right?
Vim similar as Wing has no [View] menu entry one can use for changing
the text appearance in any reasonable Windows program, so the ancient
Unix/Linux is still there with the system font as default setting for
displaying text... It looks as I were in a DOS box, not in a text editor
on Windows.
Loading a 100 MByte large file into this editor which pretends to be
able to edit files of any size results in an Error.
I was not able to find how to do rectangular select/paste and there was
no code folding for Python script code available.

Sorry, also this time still valid: Vim on Windows "no thank's".

I was just waste of my time to try it out again.

Claudio

1. Python syntax checking: as I'm typing along, if I input a syntax
error then the line is immediately highlighted in red. Useful for
catching brainos like:
if a=1:
(which will highlight in red when I hit enter, point out that I need ==
instead of =).
2. Normal tag-jump stuff: Ctrl-click on a function/method call (or
class or whatever) will jump to the function/method/class definition
(Ctrl-T works as well if you don't like clicking). It keeps a stack of
visited files so you can drill down through your call stack and then
pop back up to where you came from.
3. Python class browsing stuff: A Class menu shows the parent and child
classes of the one you're currently in, and all the methods of the
current class; selecting any of the above jumps to the appropriate file
and line.
4. Interactive documentation stuff: When I type an open-paren, it looks
to see what the prior keyword is and displays help for it in the status
line (preferring Python documentation, then docstrings, then comments
before the function/method/class definition). Even if there's no
help/comments, it'll show the arguments that the function takes. So
if, say, I type:

cmp(

then the status line displays:

cmp(x, y) Compare the two objects X and Y and return an integer
according to ...

If I hit F1 it'll show the full help text. Often the arguments are
enough, and I find the status-line display a lot less intrusive than
many on-the-fly help systems I've seen.

5. A client menu selects which client I want to work in (so, say, I get
a bug report for Client A, I select them from the menu). The Class
menu and other functions respect this (if I'm in the generic Company
class, the Class menu will list Client A's Company subclass before the
subclasses of other companies; if I jump to the Company definition,
it'll go to Company A's client-specific version). It also restarts
development httpd servers on the current machine running with conf
files appropriate to that client.
6. Full version control integration, including side-by-side diff
viewing/editing, etc
7. Editor control on uncaught errors; if I hit a web page on my
development httpd and it throws an uncaught exception, my editor will
jump to the line the exception occured at (preferring a location in the
stack that's in a file I'm currently editing).and I'll have the stack
trace in a scratch buffer if I want it, or as I jump up/down the stack
it'll show relevant parts of the trace in the status line.

There's a lot I'm forgetting, but the basic point is that even "simple"
text editors like vim can easily do a lot of Python-specific niceties
for you (emacs is similarly capable).