Wikipedia:Text editor support
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It is often convenient to edit Wikipedia articles using a full-fledged text editor, instead of the standard text area of a web browser. Text editors provide facilities that are very useful for writing articles (especially long articles), such as spell checking, search and replace, macros, and syntax highlighting. They also provide a quick and easy way of saving a local backup copy of an article, possibly for future offline editing.
This article contains pointers for adapting several external and in-browser text editors to editing Wikipedia articles.
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[edit] How to open articles in your text editor
[edit] Manual method
A "manual" way of editing in an external GUI text editor is to use copy and paste.
- Start editing the article as normally in browser (click the Edit tab of a wiki page, or use the keyboard shortcut
Shift+Alt+e) - Select the entire contents of the browser text area (as with Ctrl-A or ⌘A), then copy-paste it to a new external editor window
- Perform the editing
- Select the editor window contents, then copy and paste back to the browser text area.
Be carefull not to magle any special characters.
For a given software combination, there may be more efficient methods available:
[edit] Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox
If you are using the Mozilla web browser, it is possible to configure an external editor for editing text areas, including the Wikipedia edit area. This then avoids the need to copy and paste the article text between browser and editor. Several solutions exist:
- MozEx. The official package does not support editing UTF-8-encoded documents and does not install properly on Mozilla Firefox. However, the development version does not have these problems. A quick MozEx tutorial is available.
- ViewSourceWith provides similar functionality vis-a-vis the text editing.
- Editus Externus. Similar to the others, but the editor blocks the browser, so it is not possible to check other articles while writing.
- TextArea Sputnik, supports nonblocking editing and different encodings in an external editor. (You may see question marks in an edit textbox unrelated to the edits you are making (for example, the Unicode grapheme and other glyphs at the bottom), but your edits won't destroy the characters.)
- It's All Text!, supports nonblocking editing and utf-8 encoding.
- Vimperator, has a shortcut in its insert mode that allows external text editing.
With all these solutions, once you are done editing, you need to save in your editor, then click into the browser's text area and it will be updated. You can then hit Preview. If you want to continue editing after the preview, hit Back in your browser, then work in your editor. Alternatively, you can hit Preview before you start editing for the first time, then work in your editor, save, preview, edit some more, save, preview etc., without the need for hitting Back in between.
[edit] Use It's All Text! to invoke an external editor
When It's All Text! plugin has been installed, a little blue edit button will appear at the bottom right corner of the textarea. Just click the button to open the contents of the text area in your editor.
However, before you can use It's All Text!, you need to specify the path to your editor in the Preferences dialog box. The Preferences dialog opens automatically when you use It's All Text! for the first time, but you can open it manually as follows: Right click in the textarea to open context menu; select "It's All Text" → "Preferences".
If your editor requires some other command line options in addition to the filename, use a shell script (.bat file) to call your editor, and specify path to that script instead of calling your editor directly. In addition, you can add filename extension for wiki file type in Preferences dialog, in case your editor uses file type specific configuration.
Once the above is done, you can edit any textarea in your editor by clicking at the Edit button at the lower-right corner of the textarea. Alternatively, you can right-click on the text area. From the "It's All Text" menu, you can choose which filename extension to use for editing. Next time you use the blue edit button, the extension will be the one you used last time.
After editing, just save the file from your editor. The contents will be automatically copied to the textarea in Firefox. To indicate this, the textarea turns yellow briefly.
A tmp file is created for editing and it will be removed at the end. So if you want to preserve a text file for later editing, you can change the filename and/or save the file to another directory.
[edit] Using vim or another console editor
Some macro may work under vim, but not under gvim for some reasons (e.g., the macro to format text paragraphs). Or you just want to use vim within an X terminal as you used to do, instead of using gvim. To invoke vim within an X terminal window, you can write a shell script (see below) to invoke an X terminal and to run the vim command within that X terminal, or generally your preferred editor. Assume that the filename of this script is wiki.edit.vim, and that you put the script in the directory /home_dir/bin/ so that the path of the script would be
/home_dir/bin/wiki.edit.vim
Put the above path in the Preferences box (instead of /usr/bin/gvim) of It's All Text. It should work. Note that /home_dir/ is the complete path to your home directory from the root (/) directory; don't use ~/ (tilde) instead of /home_dir/; it won't work.
The listing of the script wiki.edit.vim is given below:
#! /bin/sh # $Id$ # vql, Thu, 27 Sep 2007, 17:56:09 EDT # # To pop up an X terminal (xterm) and run vim command within this # terminal window. # This script is intended to be invoked by the Firefox addon It's # All Text for editing wiki pages # # The arguments for xterm are the same as those used to open up # X terminals in laptop io2. See ~/manuals/laptop.io2.fc3.html, # Section on xfce. # For gray background: (NOT NEEDED, since the X terminal would be # closed down after quitting the wiki file); the \ is for # continuation to the next line: # # -bg gray \ # # For font size: # -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1 \ # # For the sidebar: # -sb # # For the size of the window (80 columns, 39 lines, right justified) # -geometry 80x39+800 \ # # For executing vim on the file being the first argument of the script # -e /usr/bin/vim $argv[1] # # Exit codes: # 0 = no problem # # Updated for generic Bourne shell by Eeera 2008-03-27 /usr/bin/xterm \ -sb \ -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1 \ -geometry 80x39+800 \ -e /usr/bin/vim "$1"
You can delete one or more xterm options used in the above script such as -sb, -fn, -geometry, etc., if you don't need them. For example, the option -bg was already deleted, as explained in the comment block of the script. Enjoy editing wiki pages!
[edit] Using vim on Mac OS X
To get It's All Text to work nicely with Vim on the Mac, you will need Macvim. Unpack the .tbz file and drag MacVim.app to your Applications folder. MacVim also comes with a script called mvim. You will need to tell It's All Text to use this script and not MacVim.app. You can put this script anywhere (like a MyScripts folder in your Applications folder), it will find MacVim.
[edit] External editor feature
Starting with MediaWiki Version 1.5, the software allows you to edit any resource using any external tool. See Help:External editors for details.
[edit] Text browsers
[edit] elinks
The text-only browser elinks also provides a function to edit textareas. The Key combination Ctrl-T calls an external editor, e.g. vim. This allows also to use syntax highlighting, edit functions, spelling corrections and saving local copies.
[edit] w3m
w3m opens an external editor for textareas by default.
[edit] Lynx
Lynx allows editing a textarea with an external editor typing Ctrl-X and e when the cursor is in the textarea. In addition, it accepts a user-definable key-binding (normally not bound) to invoke the external editor. Some packagers may assign the user-definable binding in lynx's configuration file.
[edit] Command line tools
There are also command line tools that allow you to download articles, edit them using your favorite text editor, and upload the edited articles back into the Wikipedia (or into any MediaWiki server). This bypasses the need for a web browser. These are (at least):
- mvs, a Perl program available from CPAN. There's more information at Meta:WWW::Mediawiki::Client. Unfortunately, mvs uses the name of the local file as the title of the page for the wiki remote server. If you need title pages in UTF-8 for Russian, Japanese or Arabic for example, you won't be able to upload such files. It seems that Mediawiki::Client as well as Perl libraries are not enough advanced in the management of UTF-8 characters to be fully operational, even if your terminal and shell are correctly set for UTF-8. But see Debian bug reports.
- Meta:pywikipedia is an extensive library and set of utilities for doing innumerable things with wikipedia. It can also do something as simple as editing wikipedia pages. It has some ways to avoid the wrong transmission of titles in UTF-8, for example it allows to incorporate the name of the title within the file itself and to use another command line tool. The local filename could then be written in simple ASCII. Here is an example of a file, named locally 'foo.wiki', using pagefromfile.py (from Meta:pywikipedia):
{{-start-}}'''Демография'', или наука о народонаселении, изучает численность, состав, размещение и движение населения.
{{-stop-}}
{{-start-}}'''人口学'''はヒトの人口の科学的研究をいい、主としてその大きさ、構造 2そしてその成長発展を研究対象とする。
{{-stop-}}
{{-start-}}'''Demography''' is the scientific study of human populations primarily with respect to their size, their structure and their development
{{-stop-}}
{{-start-}}'''الديمغرافية''': علم يتناول دراسة المجتمعات البشرية من حيث حجومها و بناها و تطورها و خصائصها العامة و لا سيما من النواحي الكمية.
{{-stop-}}
In the above example, the command line to upload the four pages in one submission (the 'start' and 'stop' markups drive successively the four different pages Демография, 人口学, Demography and الديمغرافية) is:
python pagefromfile.py -file:foo.wiki
[edit] Wikipediafs
Users of POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux or Mac OS X also can use the virtual filesystem Wikipedia filesystem based on Python and FUSE. It allows the user to treat articles of any Mediawiki-based implementation like real files.
This software (version 0.3) was not easy to install since it required the installation of several other software. If you are a Firefox and vim user, a much simpler solution would be to use It's All Text and gvim to edit wiki pages.
Emacs support for the WikipediaFS is provided by wikipediafs.el.
[edit] How to set up specific editors for Wikipedia editing
[edit] Eclipse plug-in
The Wikipedia Editor plugin Eclipse Wikipedia Editor is available for Eclipse (cross-platform). With an automatically updating outline of the article. It has many features which are very helpful for editing wikipedia. It also downloads articles directly from Wikipedia and has highlighting.
[edit] GNU Emacs
There are a couple of Emacs major modes available for editing Wikipedia articles:
- wikipedia-mode.el is a simple major mode that mostly provides syntax highlighting for wikipedia markup.
- wikipedia.el is a much more advanced major mode which provides WYSIWYG editing of wikipedia articles. Note, however, that it is developed using the current CVS version of GNU Emacs, may not be compatible with older versions, and has been effectively discontinued because it's not being actively maintained. Also, the mode was in the alpha stage of development when it was orphaned, so use it at your own risk.
Since Wikipedia articles don't use line breaks, you may want to install screen-lines.el, which redefines movement commands to work in terms of screen lines as opposed to text lines, or install longlines.el, which implements "word wrap" functionality for Emacs (longlines.el is now part of GNU Emacs). Installation instructions are here.
wikipediafs.el can be used along with one of the aforementionned major modes, when using the virtual Wikipedia filesystem.
[edit] jEdit
For jEdit (Java-supporting OSes) there is a plugin available at http://www.djini.de/software/mwjed/ . Apart from providing syntax highlighting for wikipedia markup, it can communicate directly with the Wikipedia website using the HttpClient component from the Jakarta Project.
[edit] Kate / KWrite
For Kate (for GNU/Linux KDE desktop), rules for syntax highlighting are provided by the XML file de:Media:Wikimedia.xml. It recognizes HTML tags and entities, wiki control characters, links, section titles, tables and <nowiki> sections.
To install this template, copy it to ~/.kde/share/apps/katepart/syntax/ for per user settings or $(PREFIX)/share/apps/katepart/syntax/ for global settings. There's also an import tool : Settings → Configure Kate → Highlighting → Download.
[edit] NoteTab
A Clip Library plugin for the NoteTab (Windows) text editor contains some functions to automate Wiki markup.
[edit] SubEthaEdit
A syntax highlighting mode is available for SubEthaEdit (Mac OS X) as well. After downloading the mode bundle, drop it in /Library/Application Support/SubEthaEdit/Modes/ (system-wide) or ~/Library/Application Support/SubEthaEdit/Modes/ (user-specific). You may need to create the final two directories by hand. The mode will be automatically selected for files with a .wiki or .wikipedia extension.
[edit] TextMate
A "MediaWiki" bundle is available in the TextMate bundle subversion repository. To learn how to load this bundle, see the TextMate manual page about installing more bundles. The bundle for now (8 August 2006) only does syntax highlighting, but the ability to fetch and post articles is coming soon.
[edit] Vedit
Wiki Tools for VEDIT contains syntax highlighting, keyboard configuration, User and Tools menus and several macros for inserting and editing wiki tags and for some more complex operations such as add/delete/copy/paste columns in a wiki table. Installation instructions included, as well as instructions for configuring It's All Text! for Vedit.
[edit] Vim
To make Vim (Amiga, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, OpenVMS, OS/2, Unix) support the MediaWiki markup used on Wikipedia (basically syntax highlighting; see It's All Text and vim/gvim for how to set up vim/gvim to edit wiki pages), save Wikipedia.vim to your "syntax" directory. By default, this directory is "~/.vim/syntax" on a Unix system, and "C:\Program Files\Vim\vimfiles\syntax" on a Windows system. If any of the directories above don't exist you may create them (the Unix/Linux command is mkdir).
To autodetect files ending in ".wiki", add the following lines to ".vim/filetype.vim" or "vimfiles\filetype.vim" (or create the file if it doesn't exist):
augroup filetypedetect
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.wiki setfiletype Wikipedia
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.wikipedia.org* setfiletype Wikipedia
augroup END
Alternatively, add the following line to the vimrc file (typically ~/.vimrc on Unix and C:\Program Files\Vim\_vimrc on Windows) (this doesn't work in Vim 7, use the above example):
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.wiki setfiletype Wikipedia autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.wikipedia.org* setfiletype Wikipedia
Alternatively, the command ":setf Wikipedia" will temporarily set the syntax for the current file.
The above mentioned Firefox extension Mozex creates a temporary file ending in ".txt" rather than ".wiki" so the above autodetection will not work in combination with that plugin. One solution is to have Mozex invoke vim with these arguments:
-c "setf Wikipedia"
Wikipedia articles often only have line-breaks at the end of each paragraph, a situation Vim by default doesn't handle as other text editors. Save the following lines to "~/.vim/ftplugin/Wikipedia.vim" or "vimfiles\ftplugin\Wikipedia.vim" to make it as you may be used to from Notepad:
" Wikipedia prefers line breaks only at the end of paragraphs (like in a text " processor), which results in long, wrapping lines. setlocal wrap linebreak setlocal textwidth=0 " No auto-wrap at all. setlocal formatoptions-=tc formatoptions+=l if v:version >= 602 | setlocal formatoptions-=a | endif " Make navigation more amenable to the long wrapping lines. noremap <buffer> k gk noremap <buffer> j gj noremap <buffer> <Up> gk noremap <buffer> <Down> gj noremap <buffer> 0 g0 noremap <buffer> ^ g^ noremap <buffer> $ g$ noremap <buffer> D dg$ noremap <buffer> C cg$ noremap <buffer> A g$a inoremap <buffer> <Up> <C-O>gk inoremap <buffer> <Down> <C-O>gj
Additional to that you may want to save the following lines to "~/.vim/ftplugin/Wikipedia.vim" or "vimfiles\ftplugin\Wikipedia.vim" for some more gimmicks (you may need to put "filetype plugin on" in your vimrc):
" utf-8 should be set if not already done globally
setlocal fileencoding=utf-8
setlocal matchpairs+=<:>
" Treat lists, indented text and tables as comment lines and continue with the
" same formatting in the next line (i.e. insert the comment leader) when hitting
" <CR> or using "o".
setlocal comments=n:#,n:*,n:\:,s:{\|,m:\|,ex:\|}
setlocal formatoptions+=roq
" match HTML tags (taken directly from $VIM/ftplugin/html.vim)
if exists("loaded_matchit")
let b:match_ignorecase=0
let b:match_skip = 's:Comment'
let b:match_words = '<:>,' .
\ '<\@<=[ou]l\>[^>]*\%(>\|$\):<\@<=li\>:<\@<=/[ou]l>,' .
\ '<\@<=dl\>[^>]*\%(>\|$\):<\@<=d[td]\>:<\@<=/dl>,' .
\ '<\@<=\([^/][^ \t>]*\)[^>]*\%(>\|$\):<\@<=/\1>'
endif
" Other useful mappings
" Insert a matching = automatically while starting a new header.
inoremap <buffer> <silent> = <C-R>=(getline('.')==''\|\|getline('.')=~'^=\+$')?"==\<Lt>Left>":"="<CR>
" Enable folding based on ==sections==
:set foldexpr=getline(v:lnum)=~'^\\(=\\+\\)[^=]\\+\\1\\(\\s*<!--.*-->\\)\\=\\s*$'?\">\".(len(matchstr(getline(v:lnum),'^=\\+'))-1):\"=\"
:set fdm=expr
Please feel free to edit Wikipedia.vim and upload an improved copy, or to check on the vim-devel list if anyone has requested the upload of Wikipedia.vim, and if not, to request it. (As of 11 July 2008, it is not in Vim's "syntax/" directory.)
The above scripts are also posted in the vim.org script collection, where they are occasionally updated with newer versions taken from community contributions on this site. Feel free to remind mvc to upload a newer copy periodically if those become stale, since they were uploaded from his vim.org account.
[edit] In-browser editors
[edit] wikEd
wikEd is a full-featured in-browser text editor that adds enhanced text processing functions to Wikipedia and other MediaWiki edit pages (currently only for Firefox and other Mozilla browsers).
Features include:
- Powerful search and replace (including Regular expressions)
- Wikicode syntax highlighting
- Fullscreen editing mode
- Edit preview and show changes on the same page without reloading
- MS-Word and web page import (including tables)
- Single-click fixing of common mistakes
wikEd can either be installed by pasting a small code snippet to your monobook.js page or locally as a Greasemonkey user script. For detailed installation instructions see the wikEd homepage.
[edit] Dealing with special characters
The English Wikipedia (and most others) are now encoded using the UTF-8 character set, which allows the use of many foreign language characters and special symbols. Such characters may appear even in articles where you wouldn't expect them due to the use of interwiki links to foreign-language versions of the article. Therefore, it's very important to use an editor that does not mangle these characters or replace them with question marks. Check your editor's documentation to make sure that it supports Unicode or UTF-8, and enable it if needed. You don't necessarily need a special editor; recent versions of Notepad and Microsoft Word support Unicode, for example. An extensive list of Unicode-supporting editors is available for Windows and other operating systems (see also: Comparison_of_text_editors).
If your editor does not support UTF-8, then copy-paste from web browser may mangle the characters. For example pasting from Windows Clipboard automatically converts characters to whatever character set is used in your editor and any characters not included in this character set are replaced with question marks. You can avoid this by using one of the helper applications or browser plugins mentioned above. For example It's All Text! does not mangle any characters.
When making an edit to an article with special characters using a new editor, it's a good idea to use the "Show changes" button (next to "Show preview") to see exactly what changes your edit will make - if areas with special characters that you didn't intend to modify are highlighted as red, that means they will be corrupted, even though both versions may look the same to you because you don't have foreign fonts installed.
BabelPad is a free editor for Windows with special support for dealing with Unicode, and is ideal if you need to determine which of several similar-looking characters an article is using, or deal with hard-to-edit Unicode control codes (like for multidirectional text).
[edit] See also
- AutoWikiBrowser
- MWiki-Browser. A fork of AutoWikiBrowser (last release in July 2007).
