[wingide-users] Impressions and feedback from a new user

[Phil Vandry]

Hello Wing users,

As a new user (I don't know how come I never found out about it before  
now), I've been trying Wing IDE for about a week and a half now. I  
really like it in principle and it has lots of great things going for  
it, but unfortunately I have decided not to buy it. The reason is  
because of the editor. Generally, of course, I spend a quite a large  
chunk of time in the editor so I'm afraid I have high expectations  
that it should work correctly, but I have found several cases where it  
doesn't do what I ask it to do. Inescapably, that's a deal breaker.

I wanted to share as many of these problems as possible because the  
software appears to be really good and if these issues were solved I  
would immediately and enthusiastically buy it!

I am using vi editing mode on MacOS and Linux (but mostly MacOS).

So on to the issues:

- Copy & Paste

In MacOS, I can't copy something from another application and paste it  
in Wing. I tried the usual MacOS keys ⌘C and ⌘V, I tried the  
traditional X11 way (select with left button and paste with middle  
button), nothing seems to work.

I can get copy & paste working within Wing with Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V  
(still no ⌘C and ⌘V or X11 middle button) but I had to set a  
preference for that. Shouldn't that work by default? The menu suggests  
some alternate keybindings like Ctrl-Insert but I've never seen this  
before and I don't even have that key on my keyboard anyway. Standard,  
well-known copy&paste methods should be better supported.

(by the way, I guess lack of support for ⌘C and ⌘V is related to  
the recent discussion about lack of a native MacOS version of Wing,  
but I have to say I kinda like it under X11 just the way it is... I'm  
afraid I would lose focus-follows-mouse if it were MacOS-native!)

- "x" doesn't work correctly at the end of a line.

When pressing "x" at the end of a line, the last character of the line  
should be erased and the cursor should back up to the new last  
character. In Wing the cursor remains at the same place, which is an  
impossible position for the cursor in vi (in vi the cursor can never  
be beyond the end of a line). The incorrect cursor position then  
causes subsequent editing commands to take effect at the wrong location.

- "p" and "P" commands don't insert at the correct place.

The "p" is supposed to always take the lines that have been yanked or  
cut into a vi buffer and insert them between the current line and the  
next line (i.e. after the current line). Similarly, "P" is supposed to  
insert the buffered lines between the previous line and the current  
line (i.e. before the current line). In Wing, both commands actually  
chop the current line in two pieces at the cursor position and insert  
the buffered lines between the pieces.

To reproduce: yank 2 lines of text by placing the cursor on the first  
line and typing "majy'a". Then move to a different line that already  
has text on it and press "p". The 2 yanked lines should appear AFTER  
the current line but they embed themselves into it instead.

- "Confirm Reload"

I constantly get a dialog asking me to confirm reloading files that  
have changed from disk. The list of files it wants to reload is all of  
the files in my project. None of them have actually changed...

- last line of the file is confusing

(I list this one for completeness but I could live with this issue,  
it's kinda minor)

In vi, it is impossible to position the cursor past the last line of  
the file. In Wing in vi mode, it is possible to place the cursor one  
line past the end of the file.

This gives the impression that there is a blank line at the end of the  
file, but there actually isn't.

-Phil