[wingide-users] small feature requests

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Ken Sugino wrote:
> I think wing is 'nearly' perfect tool for python development ;)

Thanks, and thanks for the feature requests / bug reports!

Some notes:

> 1) 'except' keyword indentation after 'return' key to match previous 'try':
> Currently, I have to manually outdent 'except'. Emacs python-mode does it
> automatically.

This is actually true also for 'else' and similar statements.  You can
just hit the tab key after you've typed the 'else:' or 'except:' and it
will dedent.  Perhaps we should just do it automatically after the ':' is
typed.  I've found that annoying in some environments, which might be why
we didn't add this in the past.  But unless there are objections I think
it makes sense to add this feature to be on by default but able to be
disabled with a pref.

> 2) Indentation of nested list:
> I often represent hierarchical structure using nested lists. And I want
> their nested level indented in a 'visually' appealing way. But wing does
> it in a strange way. So, currently I have to re-indent using C-c-> or C-c-<.
> (Is this because I'm using tab mode?)

Yes, it looks like Wing is making an absolute hash of line continued
list indentation in tab-only indentation mode.  It works properly in
spaces-only mode.  I've added a bug report.  Thanks for pointing this
out.

> 3) 'replace all in specified region' : Sometimes I only want to replace
> in some region of the file and doesn't want to push 'replace & find
> next' many times.  (O.K. I admit, I don't use this every day, but since
> it's possible in emacs, I miss it sometimes.)

This is already in the plan.

> 4) Smalltalk like source browser. The tree widget is kind of awkward to
> navigate. I miss good old smalltalk browser which has three list boxes...
> (O.K. this is again really personal preference. But I bet there are lots
> of people who prefer 'three(or four) list box' style than 'tree' style.
> And it's not that hard to do once you have the tree thing working.)

We're working on something similar using popup menus to replace the
current source index menu (which often gets quite large).  Adding
a similar list box view to the source browser seems like a good idea.
We've had requests for a similar GUI looking at variables in the debugger
too.

> 5) Coloring of entries in the source browser tree widget according to its
> kind (method, attribute,...) instead of appending 'method' or 'instance
> attribute'. Those appended texts make it harder to distinguish between them
> easily.  Since attribute name is usually like 5 character long, appended
> 'instance attribute' occupy about 80% of the whole sequence, which makes
> all of them look quite similar.

Do you mean replace the coloring for public/private/imported/etc with
kind-specific coloring or somehow combine the two?  Adding icons into
the mix might work too.  I think I'd agree that coloring by kind is
probably more useful than the current approach.  Any opinions on that
from other users?

Stephan Deibel

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Wing IDE for Python
Archaeopteryx Software, Inc
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