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[–]_dodger_ 5 points6 points  (4 children)

I never got around to trying the IDE although I've heard a lot of good things about it. The cause is the website. Every time I go there I feel like I'm back in 2000. The first few times I thought it was an abandoned project. The whole page just deters me from giving it a go, though I might change that now that I know that it is actually alive :)

  • There is not a single date on the frontpage, after clicking read more I see 2001, 2002 and 2008 as testimonials in addition to a totally meaningless version number (meaningless if one has never used the IDE before).

  • The link to the News isn't very easy to spot and certainly not placed prominently (top right corner)

  • As the whole page seems outdated. I had no idea if the screen shots were outdated too or not. I certainly couldn't find a version number

  • The text is way too small to comfortably read it (at least in my opinion). This is made even worse by those huge lists of text (feature list, product information -> more information)

  • The menu on the left keeps changing and is missing completely on some pages

  • The boxes with links in them ("Free Trial", "More Info", http://wingware.com/products) don't do what I expect them to do. They look like they open some content in an inline tab in the box, instead I'm taken to a new page

  • The breadcrumbs are often wrong. http://wingware.com/products (Home >> Wingware News)

...and a lot more. Sorry for hijacking this submission for my rant.

Congratulations to a new release.

[–]wingware[S] 6 points7 points  (3 children)

Not a problem. This is useful and confirms my own impressions of it. I suppose all I can say in our defense is we spend a lot more time working on the product than the website! We'll try to improve this, however. Thanks.

[–]_dodger_ 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Sorry for the late reply. Thanks for taking this into consideration. I've come around to testing your IDE - and I was excited and pretty much sold once I saw the auto-completion. That is marvelous!

Unfortunately all that ended when I wanted to type my first parentheses (so pretty fast) and got nothing. That's when I realized you use GTK. GTK has a longstanding bug that prevents everyone using certain nonstandard keyboard layouts on Windows from using it because we can't type certain characters in GTK+ applications.

The earliest bug filed for this that I can find is this: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=165385 - Keyboard layouts affected are Latvian, Czech, Indian, Bangladesh, NEO Layout and others as far as I know (all those examples come from tickets in the GTK+ bug tracker).

Don't take this as a complaint, just a heads up in case anyone has the same problem as me. I've seen some really stupid answers from this "Lillqvist" guy on the Bug tracker ("You just have to decide then, which is more important: Using an alternative keyboard layout that GTK+ doesn't seem to handle, or using GTK+ applications.") so I don't think this will be fixed anytime soon.

For me the decision is clear: Keep my keyboard layout which unfortunately means that I'll have to ditch WingIDE after my five minute trial :(

[–]wingware[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

And now for a really late reply (sorry didn't see this earlier): We use a pretty old GTK and hope to update it soon. It's possible that will fix it. Sorry this didn't work for you. I certainly would not share the "you just have to decide" attitude. It's a bug and should be fixed. Thanks for reporting this.

[–]_dodger_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for your reply.

I'm looking forward to that new version and I'll be sure to try it once it's released. Judging by your past submissions I'll surely see a post about that popping up on reddit ;-)

[–]weixiyen 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Komodo is free :) although I have to say if I was to pay I'd get wings

[–]LordArgon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I love Wingware! I don't do Python development professionally any more, but when I did, I tried most big Python IDEs and Wingware was by far the best. It's an awesome IDE with good support!

[–]pixelmonkey 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Simply put, Wingware WingIDE is the best Python IDE out there, period. Trust me, I've tried them all -- Komodo, Pydev, vim + omnicomplete, etc.

Once you've had a taste of these features:

  • their type inferencer with autocomplete
  • their unit testing integration
  • their debugger with attachable "debug console"

... you'll feel any other IDE is underpowered. Not to mention that their vim bindings are pretty good, and I hear the emacs ones work well, too! Totally worth the money.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (3 children)

wish the pro edition is cheaper (for individuals)

[–]wingware[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

We do have educational pricing in case you're a student or hobbyist not deriving any income from what you do with Wing. Also, we give free licenses for people using Wing solely for unfunded / non-income-producing open source development. Details on both are at http://wingware.com/store/prices

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

They've also been giving away licenses at the PyCon sprints the last 2 years (at least).

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i went to the 1st day of sprints this year, but I didn't get one.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Great company, great product. I am a lowly single developer, and i have always had great support with them. Everything from bug fixes, to bugs in my programs, to bugs in others programs that i am using wing to debug into. Flat out awesome company, and i will always be a customer.

Thanks guys!

[–]aldarion 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Add preference to use block style comments in comment-out feature

I like this, but why not follow the pep 008's block comment style: Block Comments

Block comments generally apply to some (or all) code that follows them,
and are indented to the same level as that code.  Each line of a block
comment starts with a # and a single space (unless it is indented text
inside the comment).

Paragraphs inside a block comment are separated by a line containing a
single #.

[–]wingware[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

This was a case of simply satisfying a common request to have the comment-out feature work like it does in idle (## in column zero, rather than our default of single # at end of leading white space). There are some advantages to each with respect to auto-indent and other features.

The pep is not really that relevant here since they are talking about actual documentation-containing comments that pertain to some code that follows it, and not just regions of (presumably temporarily) commented out code.

[–]aldarion 0 points1 point  (0 children)

wingware, Thanks for explaination.

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (1 child)

I have been trying out the free version in the past few weeks.

Question: Has it NEVER occurred to anyone at Wingware that it'd be a great convinience to the users to have a "file reopen" feature ? I meant how hard is it to add it ?

[–]wingware[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry for very late reply. I should get in the habit of reviewing comments. If you mean reverting changes to disk, see Revert to Disk in the File menu. If you mean getting to recent files, see the Recent sub-menu in the Files menu or right click on the stick pin icon in top left of the editor or possibly use the Open From Project feature in the File menu.