I have been trying out Wing IDE. It’s nice that it shows me instant documentation as I’m typing, but there’s still a lot I’d like to see. I have some feature requests:
- The file dialog in Wing IDE is a royal pain, just like most file dialogs. KDE is the only system I’ve seen with a consistently good file dialog, so please let me use that instead. Provide some configuration option that tells the IDE to use a shell command like “kdialog –getopenfilename /” whenever I want to open a file.
- NetBeans has the right idea for renaming symbols. It’s even better than Eclipse. In NetBeans, Ctrl-R doesn’t open a search/replace dialog, nor does it open a refactoring dialog if the symbol is private. NetBeans does something much more clever: it selects all instances of the symbol, then as you type, all instances of that symbol change simultaneously. No dialog is necessary. That feature alone tempts me to use NetBeans for Python code, even though NetBeans is as oversized as Eclipse.
- When I’m typing code, the main documentation I’m interested in is interface documentation, not implementation documentation. So Wing IDE really needs to support zope.interface.
- In both Eclipse and NetBeans, I can almost completely ignore import statements. Auto-completion adds the necessary import statements automatically. Eclipse goes even further and generates import statements when I paste code from another file, but that’s just icing on the cake.
If only Wing IDE supported these features, buying a license would be an easy decision. A promise from the developers that those features are coming soon would be very encouraging.