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 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 text editors to editing Wikipedia articles.
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[edit] How to open articles in your text editor
The "low-tech" way of editing in an external text editor is to copy and paste from the text area into the editor and back; on Windows this is usually done with Ctrl-A (Select all) Ctrl-C (Copy) Ctrl-V (Paste). There are more comfortable ways however:
[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 works with recent versions of Firefox (including 2.0 betas 1 and 2).
- 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.)
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] 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; this only works if this option is enabled when the browser is compiled.
Some versions of lynx (such as 2.8.5rel.1) use Ctrl-E to call the external editor.
[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 operationnal, even if your terminal and shell are correctly set for UTF-8.
- An alternative, in order to avoid the wrong transmission of titles in UTF-8, consists in incorporating the name of the title within the file itself (in a comment for example) 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'''-->
Демография, или наука о народонаселении, изучает численность, состав, размещение и движение населения.
{{-stop-}}
{{-start-}}<!--'''人口学'''-->
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'''-->
Demography is the scientific study of human populations primarily with respect to their size, their structure and their development
{{-stop-}}
{{-start-}}<!--'''الديمغرافية'''-->
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
UNIX-Users 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.
[edit] How to set up specific editors for Wikipedia editing
[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, and may not be compatible with older versions. It is also in the alpha stage of development, 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.
[edit] Eclipse
The Wikipedia editor plugin plog4u.org is available for Eclipse. 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] Vim
To make Vim support the MediaWiki markup used on Wikipedia, 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.
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 au BufNewFile,BufRead *.wiki setf 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):
au BufRead,BufNewFile *.wiki 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 doesn't handle gracefully by default. Save the following lines to "~/.vim/ftplugin/Wikipedia.vim" or "vimfiles\ftplugin\Wikipedia.vim" to make it easier (you may need to put "filetype plugin on" in your vimrc).
setlocal textwidth=0 setlocal linebreak setlocal matchpairs+=<:> nnoremap <buffer> k gk nnoremap <buffer> j gj nnoremap <buffer> <Up> gk nnoremap <buffer> <Down> gj nnoremap <buffer> 0 g0 nnoremap <buffer> ^ g^ nnoremap <buffer> $ g$ inoremap <buffer> <Up> <C-O>gk inoremap <buffer> <Down> <C-O>gj vnoremap <buffer> k gk vnoremap <buffer> j gj vnoremap <buffer> <Up> gk vnoremap <buffer> <Down> gj vnoremap <buffer> 0 g0 vnoremap <buffer> ^ g^ vnoremap <buffer> $ g$
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 2006-09-06, it is not in Vim's "syntax/" directory.)
[edit] jEdit
For jEdit 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] SubEthaEdit
A syntax highlighting mode is available for SubEthaEdit 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] NoteTab
A Clip Library plugin for the NoteTab text editor contains some functions to automate Wiki markup.
[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).
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") 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).
