[wingide-users] First impressions with 2.1

[Danny Bloemendaal]

Here are some of my first impressions


Bookmarks:
I really miss some kind of a marker in the code window. Something  
like a flag icon in the side line.
I want a way to jump through all the bookmarks (goto next bookmark).

Auto-bookmarking:
I'm still looking for a way to move to the previous auto-bookmark  
using the keyboard. (Long long standing request). I tried to find it  
in the help but that was no success, see below.

Show detail in stack:
Excellent. Finally, it's back :-)

Debuggin:
Eh.. please please implement tooltips while debugging. This would  
increase the user experience so much

Dual monitor support:
I'm not working on a windows machine anymore but are you guys aware  
that there are also problems on mac os regarding this? If I start  
Wing on my powerbook and then attach a second display, drag Wing to  
it and then open a dialog like file-open, that dialog is displayed on  
the wrong screen and heavily distorted in size.
Also, in the other way. If I open Wing on the second monitor, then  
close it, detach the monitor and open Wing again, I have a Wing  
window that is 1" wide.

Dialog modality:
Can you please make dialogues that are supposed to be modal really  
modal? When the file=open dialog or config dialog is showed, you can  
still click on the main window causing you to move the dialog behind  
the window.

Font support:
I thought you guys would look into the extremely poor font support on  
the mac. It still has these horrible fonts. Would be nice :-)

Help:
I still cannot search in the help docs in WinG.I guess I have to  
refer to the pdf?

Split editor mode:
Each split has an active tab. Can you change something in the active  
tab of a 'split area' that doesn't have to focus? Grayed out in some  
way? (but still recognizable as selected). I have found myself  
clicking on the start button while the cursor was in the wrong split.  
And while looking at the entire window, it isn't visually clear which  
one is active. So by only making the active tab in the active split  
blue (in the default skin) and not the rest would make this a lot  
better.

Dragging pane-dividers:
GTK/X11/Whatever is very slow on the mac. But I do like some of the  
skins and as long as you don't drag any of the pane dividers, it is  
acceptable. However, if you resize a pane and you move you mouse away  
(after having released the button) while the window is still being  
updated, the slider still follows the mouse (eventhough the button is  
not down anymore). That is extremely annoying because many times, the  
pane suddenly is extremely wide or small (coz the mouse is already on  
the other side of the window). You have to make absolutely sure that  
the drag operation is finished before moving the mouse again. I  
assume this is a limitation of the environment so my suggestion is to  
make a drag-divider that doesn't update the while dragging. Make it  
so that it just shows a moving divider (a gray line or something) and  
only when you release the mouse button, it updates the window.

Move focus, shift-f1:
What does it do? or should do? I have a split window and I see the  
focus move from the left split to the right. Doing it again moves the  
focus to the little search box in the toolbar. But from there it  
stays there. Shift-f1 doesn't do anything anymore.

Fonts borked:
In the prefs, (GlossyP, Luxi Sans 11 as disp font), source analysis,  
advanced, the scraping helper snippets table displays unreadable fonts.

SVN support:
Fantastic!
But I can't get it to work ;-). Tried everything and all I get is a:

Executing: status status -v tests/testIssueCreation.py
In: /Users/dannyb/ZopeICE/Products/IssueTracker
Errors/Warnings (stderr):

wing.py: Fatal IO error 9 (Bad file descriptor) on X server :0.0.

============================================================
Results (stdout):

Exit status=1

It works from the command line though.

Tab navigation:
Still a nightmare!! This should really be an easy fix but right now  
WinG s..ks when you have many open files. The black arrows at the  
beginning and end of the tab=bar should scroll the tab-bar instead of  
moving the focus to the next tab. Even better would be to make the  
arrow a submenu, when  you click on it, it shows a list of the tabs  
outside the view so you can quickly jump to that tab (including the  
tabs hidden on the other side of the bar!). I don't even dare to  
mention tab ordering by drag and drop ;-) Hehe.


Structural folding:
Please remember the state of the collapsed and expanded region after  
saving/closing the documents. A long standing request.

Debugging:
*I'm currently debugging Plone unittests which is painstakingly slow  
from within Wing. When I do it from the commandline it is also not  
very fast but still much faster than from within Wing. During the  
tests, the entire zope environment is launched and results are  
written to the debug i/o. However, while running, Wing almost freezes  
and hardly responds anymore to mouse events (was also like this in  
2.0). Can something be done about this?

*I'm in a split-screen and the focus in the left area, I press start  
and the debugger starts running. In the right area I have another  
python document open and create a breakpoint there. Then, when the  
breakpoint is reached, Wing stops but shows the code with the  
breakpoint in the left area while it is already showing in the right  
pane. It would be cool to quickly check if by any chance, the file is  
already showing in another pane and then use that one. It's not  
without purpose that I have the splits ;-)

Project tool/pane:
I thought you guys would add icons in the tree to make it's content  
more recognisable. It's still on my wish list ;-)

Searching:
I think searching has been improved but I need some more time with  
it. There is a glitch with the dropdown button just behind the Search  
input field inside the search tool. You mix up two different things.  
So, either the field is a dropdown box and pressing the button drops  
it down or it is a popupmenu. It behaves like both, it has menu items  
(like expanded text area (why not make the field by itself sizable?))  
but also recent search items. In any case, the menu/list disapears if  
you don't keep the button pressed. That should not be the case. Also,  
on my 1600x1200 display with Wing almost full screen, the input field  
is as wide as the total windows size (too long if you ask me) and the  
menu is also the same with. So you press the button which is entirely  
on the right side of the window and you have to look for the menu  
item on the entire left side of the screen. That's not good in my  
opinion.
Another suggestion regarding this: why show that menu at all on the  
right with additional search options like incremental, show replace  
etc. I'd say, show them like Case sensitive, Whole words etc. That  
makes it far more direct. Just tack what you want without having to  
open submenus first.


Ok, that's it for now. Probably more later :-). As you can see, most  
of the issues are usability issues and consern the user interface. I  
think that that is a very important part and should be high priority  
because that is what you experience the most while working with Wing.  
Getting rid of many of these annoyances could improve my experience  
with Wing significantly. It's not perfect yet but we're getting  
there ;-)

Kuddos
Danny