[wingide-users] Resons not to use Wing

[Michael Foord]

Hello all,

This email is meant to be constructive - sorry about the inflammatory 
title, I thought it might get your attention. ;-)

Today I paired with a colleague who normally uses Eclipse. As we were 
working on my machine we used Wing. At the end of the day he gave me a 
list of the things he finds frustrating about Wing, and why he won't 
switch (yet).


#1.   The 'tab' problem. You press tab and it *doesn't indent*. This is 
very frustrating. Smart indent has decided that this is where the cursor 
should be, and when you press tab - you can't *possibly* want it to 
move, it knows best.

    In my opinion if the cursor is *already* in the place that smart 
indent would put it, then pressing tab should still indent.

#2. Drag and drop of selected code. Is there any way to turn this off ? 
(there may already be - maybe I just haven't found it.) The number of 
times we accidentally drag the selected text a *tiny* amount and it 
duplicates it... *sigh*

#3.  It is hard to open new files from the keyboard. This is really the 
excellent 'shift-ctrl-r' feature that eclipse has that I have mentioned 
before. It makes it much easier to open new files from the keyboard.

#4.  Ok so this is a cheat. Eclipse has an excellent feature 'jump to 
method'. Press ctrl-J and it gives you a list of methods in the current 
class and you can jump to them. I say it is a cheat because this doesn't 
work with the free PyDev - but my colleague found it invaluable when 
developing for Java.

#5.  Can't rename files files from within the Wing interface.

#6.  Executing to the console is harder with Wing than with eclipse - we 
have our own scripts to do this (but they aren't yet ideal, we haven't 
really solved the asynchronous output to window problem and we can't 
kill the process from within Wing). Wing's support for executing scripts 
is very tied to the debugger, which obviously isn't ideal for us.


So the good news is, there is lots of room for Wing to get even better. :-)

All the best,


Michael Foord
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles.shtml