There are three version of this IDE, each focused on different types of users:
Wing Pro – a full-featured commercial version, for professional programmers
Wing Personal – a free version that omits many of these features, for students and hobbyists
Wing 101 – a very simplified free version for teaching beginner programmers
Wing Pro provides AI assisted development, local and remote debugging, editing (with multiple key bindings, auto-completion, auto-editing, and multi-selection), source browser and code navigation, code refactoring, import management, error checking, auto-reformatting, unit testing with code coverage, version control, project management, Python environment and package management, single and multi-file search, fine-grained customization, support for Docker and LXC containers, assistance for working with third-party frameworks and tools (such as Django, Flask, Matplotlib, Pandas, Blender, Maya, Unreal Engine, PyQt, wxPython, and others) through Python scripting, and comprehensive documentation.
Wing Personal and Wing 101 omit many of these features. All three versions of Wing have installation packages that allow it to be run on Windows, Mac OS X and Intel and ARM Linux.
Free licenses for Wing Pro are available on the application for some educational users and unpaid open-source software developers.
The AI assistant can be used to write new code, refactor or redesign existing code, and inspect and understand code.
Insert the AI assistant's best guess for new code at the current editor insertion point, based on context
Refactor or rewrite selected code according to written instructions like "add documentation string", "convert this threaded code into an async implementation", or "convert this into a Python generator."
Write new code at the current editor insertion point according to a written description like "add unit tests for class MyClass", or "create client/server classes that wrap class CMyClass using sockets and JSON."
Chat with an AI assistant, to ask about some code or iterate towards a solution for a bug fix or extension, without changing any of the existing source code directly.
AI assisted development is available in Wing Pro only.
The debugger can be used to locate and fix bugs, as well as a way to write new code interactively in 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 (as a file or module with 'python -m')
Interactive debugging from (and within) the integrated Python Shell
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
Multi-process and automatic child process debugging
The code intelligence features speed up editing, facilitated navigation through code, and inspected code for errors. These features rely both on static analysis of Python code found in the project and on the Python Path and runtime analysis of code whenever the debugger is active or the code is active in the integrated Python Shell. The features available to the user depend on the version being used.
Wing 101 provides:
Auto-completer offers completions in Python code and in the integrated Python shell (this feature is disabled by default in Wing 101 but can be enabled in preferences)
Source index menus in each editor provide a handy index into the source code
Goto-definition
Auto-indent
PEP8, Black, YAPF, and Ruff 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 the current file or any project file
Source Assistant: provides context-appropriate call signature and documentation with the rendering of PEP287 docstrings
Class browser for single files or whole project
Wing Pro adds:
Code Warnings tool
Pylint, pep8 checker, mypy, flake8, and Ruff integrations
Module browser
Source Assistant includes standard library documentation links
Find all points of use of a symbol, filtering out different but like-named symbols
Find the symbol by name, in the current file or all project files
Refactoring: rename or move a symbol and update points of use, extract a range of code to a new function or method, introduce a variable, and manage imports
Wing's project manager allows developers to set up, manage, and share development configurations. It supports creating projects for existing or new source directories, with optional code retrieval from version control repositories. The IDE facilitates easy creation and configuration of Python environments using virtualenv, pip, Poetry, pipenv, or conda, either locally, on a remote host, or with containers managed by Docker or LXC/LXD.[1]
Wing Pro integrates with various version control systems, including Git, Mercurial, Perforce, Subversion, and CVS. It offers features such as status checking, committing, logging, blame/praise/annotate, reverting, resolving, and repository push/pull operations. A difference and merge tool is also available for comparing files or directories and reviewing uncommitted changes.[1]
Wing Pro includes an integrated package management tool that simplifies inspecting, adding, removing, and upgrading Python packages in the development environment. It supports pip, Poetry, pipenv, and conda environments.[1]
Wing Pro additionally supports unit testing by allowing running and debugging of unit tests written for the unittest, pytest, doctest, nose, and Django testing frameworks. It optionally tracks code coverage, to indicate how well code is being tested and to re-run only tests affected by changes to code.
Wing Pro also supports secure development on remote hosts, virtual machines, or containers hosted by Docker, Docker Compose, or LXC/LXD. 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.
The first public version of Wing was released on the 7th of September of 2000, as 1.0 beta, only for Linux.
The first stable version was v1.0 for Linux, released on the 1st of December of 2000.
As of March 29, 2004, Archaeopteryx Software Inc began doing business as Wingware.
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. Wing 10 uses PyQt6.5.
