Wing IDE

The Wing IDE is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Wingware that is designed specifically for the programming language Python, to reduce development and debugging time, coding errors, and make it easier to understand and navigate Python code.

It provides local and remote debugging, editing (with multiple key bindings, auto-completion, and auto-editing), code intelligence, source browser and code navigation, code refactoring, unit testing, version control, Pylint integration, project management, search abilities, and extensive documentation.

Product levels

Wing IDE is available in three product levels:

• Wing IDE Professional – a full-featured commercial version
• Wing IDE Personal – a low-cost version, omits some features
• Wing IDE 101 – a simplified free version for educators, students, and hobbyists

For details on features provided in each product see the feature matrix. All three versions of Wing IDE run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Free licenses for the Professional version are available on application for some educational uses and for unpaid open-source software developers, (see here).

Debugging

The level of the debugging support depends on the version used.

The free, (101), version supports:

• GUI, Web, and script debugging
• Exception traceback reporting
• View stack, locals/globals, and return value
• Supports input() and raw_input()
• Integrated debug process I/O with configurable text encoding
• Native console I/O

The Personal Edition adds:

• Multithreaded debugging
• Remote debugging
• Debug value tooltips
• Detect unhandled exceptions
• Works with Django, web2py, Flask, Google App Engine, Plone, Turbogears, Zope and Plone
• Remotely debug code running on Raspberry Pi
• Alter debug data values
• Multiple named entry points and debug launch configurations

And Professional includes:

• Interactive debug probe with auto-completion, syntax highlighting, goto-definition, call tips, and documentation links
• Convenient Restart Debugging tool
• Track values by reference
• Evaluate expressions
• Conditional breakpoints
• Ignore-counted breakpoints
• Enable/disable breakpoints
• Move debug program counter
• Multi-process and automatic child process debugging
• Debugs unit tests
• Breakpoint manager
• Process attach/detach
• Inspect sys.modules
• Debug Django template files
• matplotlib mainloop support
• Mark a range of code in the editor for quick reevaluation in Python Shell or Debug Probe

Code intelligence

• Auto-completer: offers completions both in the editor and in the integrated Python shells.
• Source Assistant: provides context-appropriate call signature and source documentation in the editor and in the source browser.
• Error indicators: flag bad code as you type.
• Source browser: browse single files or whole project by module or class hierarchy.
• Goto-definition: jump directly to point of definition.
• Find Symbol: keyboard-driven goto-definition within current file or any project file.
• Find Uses: find all points of use of a symbol, filtering out different but like-named symbols.
• Refactoring: rename or move a symbol and update points of use, or extract a range of code to a new function or method.
• Navigation menus: layered menus in each editor provide a handy index into source code.
• Indentation analyzer: inspect, repair, and convert indentation style in source files. Wing's editor also auto-indents and block indents according to context.

Version control

Version control integration is available only in Wing IDE Professional. It supports:

• Subversion,
• CVS,
• Bazaar,
• git,
• Mercurial, and
• Perforce.

Other features

• Emulates emacs, vim, Visual Studio, Eclipse, XCode, and Brief, and users can add custom key bindings
• Syntax highlighting for Python, Django (web framework) templates, CoffeeScript, HTML/XML, CSS, JavaScript, C/C++, and about 70 other programming languages
• Integrated Python shell with auto-completion, syntax highlighting, goto-definition, call tips, and documentation links
• Search interfaces for keyboard or GUI-driven search in one or multiple files, using text matching, wild card, or regex searching
• Unit testing integration runs and debugs tests written with the unittest, pytest, doctest, nose, and Django testing frameworks
• Flexible GUI layout and color schemes
• Project manager with project-wide search, quick project file open, and revision control integrated file management
• Bookmarks
• Code snippets with recursive inline data entry
• Pylint integration
• Perspectives for naming custom GUI layouts
• Execute external commands in integrated OS Commands tool
• Extensive documentation, How-Tos, and tutorial
• Extend the IDE's functionality with Python scripts
• Volunteer-maintained German and French GUI localization

History

First public version of Wing IDE was released on 2000-09-07, as 1.0 beta, only for Linux.

First stable version was v1.0 for Linux, on 2000-12-01.

Wing version 4.x and earlier were based on GTK2 and the OS X version required X11. Wing 5.0 and later are based on Qt4 and no longer use X11 on OS X.

The history of all releases to date can be found at http://wingware.com/news

See also

• List of integrated development environments for Python

External links

• Official website
• Wing IDE Users Mailing List
• Product Level Feature Comparison