Wingide is a beautiful application

[sjdevnull at yahoo.com]

Claudio Grondi wrote:
> The only thing what makes a difference to me is, that Wing 'understands'
> Python code what results in features not available elsewhere (e.g. go to
> definition).

This is something that pretty much any reasonable programming editor
will get you.  Vim and emacs both do it.

I get the feeling that a ot of people working with heavy IDEs don't
realize how capable vim/emacs are, so I'll give a brief rundown of what
my Vim environment does for me.  (I do Python web development)--if you
don't like the Vi keybindings, the Cream package is Vim that behaves
like a regular modeless editor but with all of vim's power (and a nice
embedded Python interpreter for writing extensions):

1. Python syntax checking: as I'm typing along, if I input a syntax
error then the line is immediately highlighted in red.  Useful for
catching brainos like:
if a=1:
(which will highlight in red when I hit enter, point out that I need ==
instead of =).
2. Normal tag-jump stuff: Ctrl-click on a function/method call (or
class or whatever) will jump to the function/method/class definition
(Ctrl-T works as well if you don't like clicking).  It keeps a stack of
visited files so you can drill down through your call stack and then
pop back up to where you came from.
3. Python class browsing stuff: A Class menu shows the parent and child
classes of the one you're currently in, and all the methods of the
current class; selecting any of the above jumps to the appropriate file
and line.
4. Interactive documentation stuff: When I type an open-paren, it looks
to see what the prior keyword is and displays help for it in the status
line (preferring Python documentation, then docstrings, then comments
before the function/method/class definition).  Even if there's no
help/comments, it'll show the arguments that the function takes.  So
if, say, I type:

cmp(

then the status line displays:

cmp(x, y) Compare the two objects X and Y and return an integer
according to ...

If I hit F1 it'll show the full help text.  Often the arguments are
enough, and I find the status-line display a lot less intrusive than
many on-the-fly help systems I've seen.

5. A client menu selects which client I want to work in (so, say, I get
a bug report for Client A, I select them from the menu).  The Class
menu and other functions respect this (if I'm in the generic Company
class, the Class menu will list Client A's Company subclass before the
subclasses of other companies; if I jump to the Company definition,
it'll go to Company A's client-specific version).  It also restarts
development httpd servers on the current machine running with conf
files appropriate to that client.
6. Full version control integration, including side-by-side diff
viewing/editing, etc
7. Editor control on uncaught errors; if I hit a web page on my
development httpd and it throws an uncaught exception, my editor will
jump to the line the exception occured at (preferring a location in the
stack that's in a file I'm currently editing).and I'll have the stack
trace in a scratch buffer if I want it, or as I jump up/down the stack
it'll show relevant parts of the trace in the status line.

There's a lot I'm forgetting, but the basic point is that even "simple"
text editors like vim can easily do a lot of Python-specific niceties
for you (emacs is similarly capable).