Backing Up and Sharing Settings
To back up your license, preferences, and other settings, you only need to back up the Settings Directory, which is listed in Wing's About box, accessed from the Help menu.
The process of restoring Wing or moving to a new machine consists simply of installing Wing again, restoring the above directory, and (in Wing Pro) reactivating your license if necessary.
The only other Wing-specific data that the IDE will write to your disk is in your project files (*.wpr and *.wpu if you are using the Shared style of project in Wing Pro; see Project Types for details). We recommend using the default Shared project type and checking the *.wpr into revision control.
The *.wpu contains user-specific and machine-specific data such as environment, path, window position, list of open files, and other GUI state. The file is worth backing up, but usually not hard to recreate if lost.
Note that Wing Personal does not use .wpu files and Wing 101 does not have project files at all.
Wing also writes to a cache directory (also listed in the About box) and your OS-provided temporary directory, but those can be recreated from scratch if lost. The only possible exception to this is autosave in the cache directory, which contains unsaved files open in the IDE.
For more information on the location of these directories, see User Settings Directory.
Sharing Settings
Many of the settings found in the Settings Directory can be shared to other machines or with other users of Wing. This includes the following files and directories (some of which are omitted in Wing Personal and Wing 101):
- filesets -- shared file sets used for selecting files to search or include in the project.
- launch -- shared launch configurations used for defining environment for debugging and executing code.
- palettes -- any user-defined display themes used for configuring the user interface.
- perspectives -- shared perspectives which store particular configurations of tools and editors.
- oscommands -- shared OS Commands which can be used from any project file.
- preferences -- Wing's preferences, as configured in the Preferences dialog.
- recent* -- lists of recent files, projects, commands, and so forth.
- remote-hosts -- shared remote hosts configurations used for remote development.
- containers -- shared container configurations.
- clusters -- shared cluster configurations.
- scripts -- scripts that extend IDE functionality.
- snippets -- user-defined code snippets for quick entry of predefined blocks of code.
- syntax -- user-defined syntax colors for file types available in the editor.
Follow the links above to find details on the file formats involved. Most are simple textual formats that are easy to generate or modify if necessary. Wing does need to be restarted when replacing these files, and may overwrite changes made while it is running.
