The Wing Python IDE family of integrated development environments from Wingware was created specifically for the Python programming language. These lightweight but full-featured Python IDEs are designed to speed up writing, debugging, and testing code, to reduce the incidence of coding errors, and to make it easier to understand and navigate Python code. There are three products in this product line, each focused on different types of users:
Wing Pro – a full-featured commercial version, for professional programmers
Wing Personal – free version that omits some features, for students and hobbyists
Wing 101 – a very simplified free version, for teaching beginning programmers
Wing Pro provides local and remote debugging, editing, code intelligence, multi-selection, source browser and code navigation, code refactoring, unit testing, version control, Pylint integration, project management, search abilities, fine-grained customization, extension through Python scripting, and comprehensive documentation. Wing Personal and Wing 101 omit some of these features. For details on features provided in each product see the . All three versions of Wing run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Free licenses for Wing Pro are available on application for some educational uses and for unpaid open-source software developers, .
Debugger
The debugger can be used to track down and fix bugs, and also as a way to write new code interactively win the live runtime state for which the code is being designed. The level of the debugging support depends on the version used. Wing 101 supports:
Debug code launched from the IDE
Interactive debugging from the integrated Python Shell
Exception and traceback reporting
View stack, locals/globals, and return values
Data frame and array viewer
Integrated Debug I/O tool with configurable text encoding
Optional native console I/O
Steps over importlib frames
Wing Personal adds:
Multi-threaded debugging
Debug code launched outside of the IDE, including code running under a web framework or embedded instance of Python
Debug value tooltips
Alter debug data values
Define named entry points and debug launch configurations
Wing Pro adds:
Interactive Debug Probe command line for inspecting the current debug frame, with auto-completion, syntax highlighting, goto-definition, call tips, and documentation links
Mark a range of code in the editor for quick reevaluation in Python Shell or Debug Probe
Code intelligence
The code intelligence features speed up editing, facilitate navigation through code, and inspects code for errors. These features rely both on static analysis of Python code found in the project and on the Python Path, and on runtime analysis of code whenever the debugger is active or the code is active in the integrated Python Shell. The features available depend on product level: Wing 101 provides:
Auto-completer offers completions in Python code and in the integrated Python shell
Source index menus in each editor provide a handy index into source code
Goto-definition
Auto-indent
PEP8, Black, and YAPF reformatting
Syntax and indentation error indicators
Convert indents and end-of-line characters on paste
Understands PEP 484 and 526 type hinting
Wing Personal adds:
Find Symbol: keyboard-driven goto-definition within current file or any project file.
support is available only in Wing Pro. It supports running and debugging unit tests written for the unittest, , doctest, nose, and Django testing frameworks.
Remote development
Wing Pro also supports secure development on remote hosts, virtual machines, or containers. Code on the remote system may be edited, debugged, tested, and managed from the IDE, as for locally stored files. Remote development also supports externally launched debugging.
Other features
Other features present in all the product levels include:
Perspectives for naming custom user interface layouts
Execute external commands in integrated OS Commands tool
Extend the IDE's functionality with Python scripts
History
First public version of Wing was released on 2000-09-07, as 1.0 beta, only for Linux. First stable version was v1.0 for Linux, on 2000-12-01. Corporate name change: Archaeopteryx Software Inc is now doing business as Wingware: March 29, 2004 Wing version 4.x and earlier were based on GTK2 and the OS X version required X11. Wing 5 changed to Qt4 via PySide and no longer uses X11 on OS X. Wing 6 moved to Qt5 with PyQt5. The history of all releases to date can be found at https://wingware.com/news
