Wing IDE 4.0 beta4

Cranes

Wing IDE 4.0 adds a diff/merge tool, support for Django and matplotlib, and optimizes some aspects of static source analysis and project loading.

New Features

The major features available in the current beta of Wing IDE 4.0 are: (1) a Diff/Merge tool, (2) project setup and debugging support for Django developers, (3) and special debugging support for matplotlib.

Diff/Merge Tool

The diff/merge viewer can be accessed from the new magnifying glass drop-down icon in the toolbar, and from the editor and project view context menus.

Currently diff/merge allows comparing two selected files or directories, two visible files, the modified buffer to the corresponding disk file, and a file or directory to the corresponding revision in the source code control repository (for Subversion, Mercurial, Bazaar, Git, Perforce, and CVS). Use the expanded toolbar icons to move up and down through changes or to merge changes from one file into another. Multiple diff/merge sessions can be active at the same time and accessed from the magnifying glass drop down menu in the toolbar.

This tool is still under development. The GUI may change in future betas and there is no documentation yet. Creating and applying patches and selecting arbitrary revisions for comparison are also not yet implemented.

Django Support

Wing IDE 4.0's support for Django includes:

  • Support for setting breakpoints in, stepping through, and viewing data in Django template files
  • Better syntax highlighting for Django template files
  • Improved auto-completion in Django templates, especially when the debugger is active and paused or at a breakpoint and the Django template is active on the call stack
  • A Django plugin (in Wing IDE Professional only) that makes it easy to create a new Django project, set up a Wing IDE project to work with an existing Django project, and takes care of routine tasks

If you already have a Wing IDE project that you are using with Django, verify that the Django menu appears in the menu bar and then select Configure Project for Django from that menu.

If you do not already have a Wing IDE project set up, refer to the the "Using Wing IDE with Django" How-To in Wing's help menu.

For more information on the new Django support, see the document Using Wing IDE with Django under How-Tos in Wing IDE's Help menu.

matplotlib Support

Wing IDE 4.0's support for matplotlib allows for interactive display of plots while typing in the Python Shell and Debug Probe and avoids blocking when show() is called. This should work with the TkAgg, GTKAgg, WXAgg (for wxPython 2.5+) and Qt4Agg backends.

For more information on the new matplotlib support, see the document Using Wing IDE with matplotlib under How-Tos in Wing IDE's Help menu.

Reporting Bugs

While the Wingware development team uses the Wing IDE 4.0 code base daily, this is beta quality software and you probably will encounter bugs. To report bugs, please submit a bug report from the Help menu in Wing IDE, or email us at support at wingware dot com

Please do not post bug reports to the wingide-users mailing list since most users there are not working with the beta.

Release Notes for Django Users

  • If debugging templates does not work under Django 1.2, you are running into this bug. To work around it, upgrade to Django 1.2.1 or change your TEMPLATE_LOADERS setting in your settings.py file to the following:
    TEMPLATE_LOADERS = (
    'django.template.loaders.filesystem.load_template_source',
    'django.template.loaders.app_directories.load_template_source',
)
  • The support has been tested only with Django 1.1 and 1.2
  • The Django plugin functionality is in scripts/django.py in your Wing installation and is user-editable. See the document Using Wing IDE with Django under the How-Tos item in the Help menu for details.
  • Note that you cannot debug the Django template internals code at the Python level as long as the Enable Django Template Debugging feature is enabled under the Extensions tab in Project Properties.

Compatibility Notes

  • Wing 4.0 installs side by side with Wing 3.x, so there is no need to remove the stable version of Wing in order to try the beta release.
  • Support for PPC OS X has been dropped
  • The Templates tool was renamed to Snippets
  • For other compatibility details, see the Changes sections in the CHANGELOG.txt file in the release.

Installing

Just download one of: Wing Pro, Wing Personal, or Wing 101, then install and run Wing IDE as with previous versions.

NOTE: The diff/merge tool and Django plugin are only present in Wing IDE Professional.

Upgrading

Wing IDE 4.x requires a paid upgrade for users of Wing IDE 3.x, if that license was purchased more than a year ago. If you do not have a 4.x license, use a series of trial licenses with the beta release, or you can upgrade a license or purchase a new license.