Wing IDE 5.0 beta3

Cranes

The third beta of Wing IDE Professional 5 is now available for Windows, Linux and OS X. Wing IDE Personal and 101 are not included and will follow in a later beta.

What's New in Wing IDE 5

The feature highlights of Wing IDE 5 are:

  • Redesigned GUI -- Wing IDE now runs on Qt via PySide (earlier versions used PyGTK instead). As a result, Wing is native on OS X and many quirks in Wing 4 have been fixed by this change. Editors and tools can be dragged and dropped to other splits, to a new split, or to new windows. The toolbar and context menus in the editor and Project tool are now configurable. Preferences and some menus have been reorganized for clarity.
  • New Editor Split Mode -- Wing now supports opening different sets of files in each editor split. This mode is disabled by default but can be enabled by unchecking Show All Files in All Splits in the editor split options drop down (top right of editor).
  • Sharable Color Palettes -- Color palettes for the GUI as a whole and for syntax highlighting individual file types can be defined and shared. This is documented in the Customization chapter of the manual.
  • Auto-Editing -- Auto-editing is enabled by default, except for operations that may be jarring to new users. Be sure to try also the operations that are off by default: auto-entering of spaces, PEP8 spacing, and block management with repeated presses of the colon key. These can be configured from the Edit > Keyboard Personality menu.
  • Named File Sets -- Sets of files found by searching, or selected in the user interface can be named and visited from the File menu and Open Files tool, or used for searching in Search in Files.
  • Sharable Launch Configurations -- Launch configurations that define the environment for a sub-process can be defined in the Project menu and used for debugging, unit testing, or in the OS Commands tool.
  • Named Entry Points -- Named entry points can be defined in the Debug menu to make it easier to debug or execute code with different arguments or environment.
  • Unit Test Environment -- The environment for unit tests can now be configured independently from debug environment in the Testing tab of Project Properties and File Properties.
  • Lockable Editor Splits -- Clicking on the stick pin icon will lock an editor split so it is not reused for opening other files unless there are no unlocked editor splits. A second click changes the editor to non-sticky (auto-closing) and a third click returns it to sticky mode.
  • Startup Preferences Dialog -- For new installations where no Wing 4.x preferences are converted, Wing displays a dialog for selecting the most commonly altered preferences (keyboard personality, tab key action, and whether to enable auto-editing)
  • Minor Features -- There are also some new minor features in Wing 5, such as a preference to control whether copy on an empty line copies the whole line (on by default), and expanded bookmarks and diff/merge menus at the top right of the editor (only shown when relevant)

Documentation

For more information on Wing IDE 5's features, please refer to the integrated documentation in the Help menu. Note that the documentation hosted on our website is for the latest stable release and not for this beta release.

Known Bugs

  • Folding in the editor is disabled
  • Printing does not work
  • Dragging files onto the IDE window to open them does not work
  • The PDF manual is not present in the builds
  • Icons look pixelated on Retina displays (but text should be smooth)
  • 64-bit debugger support is not included with the 32-bit Linux builds
  • Keyboard-driven navigation of the GUI is not yet well supported
  • The Source Browser can be slow

Reporting Bugs

Wingware's development team uses the Wing IDE 5 code base daily to do our own work. However, 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.

Compatibility Notes

  • Wing 5 installs side by side with Wing 4, so there is no need to remove the stable version of Wing in order to try the beta release.
  • Wing 5 will read and convert Wing 4 preferences, settings, and projects. Projects should be saved to a new name for use with Wing 5 since they cannot be read by Wing 4
  • Auto-editing is on by default except for auto-entering spaces and block management with repeated presses of the colon key
  • Preferences and some menus have been reorganized
  • File Sets from Wing IDE 4 are now called File Filters. File Sets in Wing 5 are a new feature for creating named sets of files.
  • File Properties have changed to make use of Launch Configurations
  • OS Commands has been redesigned to use Launch Configurations and Named Entry Points
  • Accelerators may have changed from Wing 4 and are no longer available on OS X because Qt follows Mac user interface guidelines
  • More project data is stored in the shared branch of two-file projects (Python Path, OS Commands)
  • Support for Python <= 2.2 has been dropped on Windows and support for Python <= 2.6 has been dropped on OS X
  • For other compatibility details, see the Changes sections of the CHANGELOG.txt file in the release.

Installing

Only Wing Pro for Windows, Linux, and OS X is currently available. Wing Personal and Wing 101 will follow in a later beta release. After downloading the appropriate distribution, install and then run Wing IDE as with previous versions.

Important Note for Linux Users: On Linux, Wing is packaged to assume Qt4 is provided by the Linux distribution. The package manager may install Qt and other packages while Wing is being installed. You may want to inspect what dependencies are being installed to ensure you can uninstall all packages to return your system to its former state if desired. Later versions of Wing on Linux may include a private copy of Qt, as do the installers for Windows and OS X.

Upgrading

Wing 5 licenses are not yet being sold. Please use a series of trial licenses with Wing IDE 5, or you can use a Wing 4 license purchased within a year or covered by Support+Upgrades if you first email us the license number. To renew Support+Upgrades on a Wing 4 license, visit our upgrades page and enter your license number.

Legal

Wingware reserves the right to change pricing and details of the software license for Wing IDE 5 during the beta release process.