WikiQueer:Text editor support

It is often convenient to edit WikiQueer 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 page contains pointers for adapting several external and in-browser text editors to editing WikiQueer articles.

Manual method
A "manual" way of editing in an external GUI text editor is to use copy and paste. Be careful not to mangle any special characters.
 * 1) Start editing the article as normally in browser (click the Edit tab of a wiki page, or use the keyboard shortcut Shift)
 * 2) Select the entire contents of the browser text area (as with Ctrl or Cmd), then copy-paste it to a new external editor window
 * 3) Perform the editing
 * 4) Select the editor window contents, then copy and paste back to the browser text area.

For a given software combination, there may be more efficient methods available:

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 WikiQueer 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 and Pentadactyl have a shortcut in Insert mode that allows external text editing (the default is Ctrl+i).

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 is 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.

Use It's All Text! to invoke an external editor
When It's All Text! plugin has been installed, a little blue edit button appears at the bottom right corner of the text area. 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 text area to open context menu; select "It's All Text" &rarr; "Preferences".

If your editor requires some other command line options in addition to the filename, use a shell script (.sh file in Linux and OS X, or .bat in Windows) 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 text area in your editor by clicking at the Edit button at the lower-right corner of the text area. 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 is the one you used last time.

After editing, just save the file from your editor. The contents are automatically copied to the text area in Firefox. To indicate this, the text area turns yellow briefly.

A temporary file is created for editing and it is removed at the end. So if you want to preserve a text file for later editing, you can change the file name and/or save the file to another directory.

Using Vim or another console editor
Some macros may work under Vim, but not under gVim for some reason (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  command within that X terminal, or generally your preferred editor. Assume that the filename of this script is, and that you put the script in the directory   so that the path of the script would be Put the above path in the Preferences box (instead of  ) of It's All Text. It should work. Note that  is the complete path to your home directory from the root  directory; don't use   (tilde) instead of  ; it won't work. The listing of the script  is given below: Don't forget to make the file executable with  tags): Advanced text editors, like vi or VIM, do typically show cursor position within a line in their status areas and thus allow to gauge line length when the cursor is at the end of a line.

In a longer paragraph of article code containing references, single linebreaks can be inserted within reference code, so long as parameter values themselves are not broken.
 * Some editors hold the practice of entering a linebreak before every reference parameter (as can be seen in examples of Citation templates; Whether this is a good practice within text, is subject to debate);
 * Others choose not to interfere with a paragraph's visual consistency and enter a linebreak before a very long URL, one that is longer than the visual line in a terminal window, which is usually the length of 80 characters. If the situation in text necessitates, a linebreak can also be inserted before other parameters.

Because URLs are typically long, placing these on a new line is handy for comparing article editions, as some textually non-breaking code prepended and/or appended to a URL may lie outside a comparison iframe's viewport and this may hinder in discovery of changes made to an article.

If a paragraph line is near the limit or exceeds it by just a few characters, then article editors can choose to optimize code or text:
 * By removing superfluous spaces:
 * the best practice with extensive template data (such as references) is to only separate the last character of a previous parameter value and the marker pipe of next parameter's name;
 * In plain text after a sentence-ending period, some article writers add two spaces instead of one, but browsers ignore this.
 * By refactoring template data into a shorter format:  can be replaced with   &mdash; Users with their own date preferences should then see dates in their favoured format when logged in;
 * By rewording a line without affecting the nature of the text within.
 * The above applies even if a paragraph line does not contain breakable code.

If a line paragraph still exceeds the 1023-character limit, but does not contain any reference code (or any other wikicode that would work with linebreaks), then users should consider logically breaking that paragraph into two for better legibility.

If accented and international characters fail to show properly, use a terminal program that has support for Unicode (such as uxterm) and set the assumed and display character sets to UTF-8 or greater in Lynx options.
 * Encoding

Nevertheless, article content with any special characters &mdash; including non-standard Latin, Cyrillic, or other non-Latin languages &mdash; are seen in Lynx textareas in the UTF-8  format, which in that form are sent to text editors and then back.

Beware that these UTF-8 glyph representations are not treated as one character, but six (ö = ), and these add to the 1023-character line limit.

Such behaviour is a hindrance to editing non-Latin texts, and even Latin texts that are written in languages that may feature extensive amounts of accented characters. See for more.

Lynx in Windows
In addition to above instructions, there are intricacies specific to Windows.

If you want to use Wikimedia's secure servers, get a version of Lynx that supports SSL. To find out if yours already does, go to Options and see if the User-Agent header contains.

The assumed character set should be, as this is also the default charset used by WikiQueer. The display character set can be different, such as, but editable text will always be in.

Configuration files for Lynx are simple text files and can be edited from any text editor that supports Unix linebreaks. In Windows 9x, the built-in text editor for this is WordPad, because Notepad does not support the Unix Line Feed.
 * Lynx configuration files

  is the config file for Lynx; the global config file in Windows is always located in the same folder as the Lynx executable, wherever it has been installed to. A typical location is. If Lynx is installed in that folder, then Windows Vista and newer usually require administrator access to edit the file (via User Account Control).

  is a per-user Lynx User Defaults File saved from the Options page. Settings in it take priority over the global config file. In Windows Vista the per-user User Defaults file can be in. If the file is in the  directory, care is advised when using automated cleanup tools, such as Disk Cleanup.

Option syntax is different between global (lynx.cfg) and per-user (lynx.rc) configuration files.

is extensive; very often almost all options are placed into it, along with explanatory comments for each option. If it's not so, there's an official online version at lynx.isc.org/lynx2.8.7/lynx2-8-7/lynx.cfg &mdash; Keep in mind that if your Lynx version is different, change the numbers in the URL accordingly, as some options may be version-specific.

The best way to find an option is by using the text editor's find feature.

When not in active use, an option is commented out with a hash  and its default setting is on; To use an option, delete the hash character before it. It may occasionally happen that the config file does not contain a specific option, but it can be added by the user.

The following options are often found as defaults in Lynx binaries compiled for Windows and might not meet formatting conventions used in WikiQueer. These options can be edited from  and are usually not specified in the Options page. Before making changes, make a backup copy of the file, renaming it to, for example.
 * Defaults to reconsider

Collapsed  tags The  option should be set to , as in the example below: COLLAPSE_BR_TAGS:FALSE The reason is that some editors intentionally use more than one  tag, especially in locations where conventional paragraph breaks are not allowed.

Justified text Graphical browsers do not show this, since justification is not used. For this, set JUSTIFY:FALSE

Numbered links As WikiQueer articles very often feature linked content in tables, the numbers in brackets before or next to links may be distracting. Set these following options: DEFAULT_KEYPAD_MODE:LINKS_ARE_NOT_NUMBERED NUMBER_LINKS_ON_LEFT:FALSE

The typical key combination to invoke an out-of-Lynx editor in Windows is Ctrl+x+e and not Ctrl+E+e like in Unices and elsewhere; this can be changed in the config file. Both an internal and external editor can be used, according to taste and preferences. Avoid Windows Notepad for reasons in above paragraphs. And only starting with Windows XP does WordPad have full Unicode support (with some reservations). An example with Vim, configured to use the mediawiki syntax: SYSTEM_EDITOR:C:\Progra~1\Vim\vim73\vim.exe -c "setf mediawiki" Note double quotes ^
 * Editing

When using an in-window editor like Vim and after exiting back into Lynx, any colour theme Lynx uses is rendered inoperable (links and buttons not highlighted anymore), so the best practice is to never show colors in Options (in section Appearance), and save the settings.
 * Colour issues

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 WikiQueer (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.

'Демография, или наука о народонаселении, изучает численность, состав, размещение и движение населения.
 * pyWikiQueer is an extensive library and set of utilities for doing innumerable things with WikiQueer. It can also do something as simple as editing WikiQueer 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 pyWikiQueer):

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、そしてその成長発展を研究対象とする.

Demography is the scientific study of human populations primarily with respect to their size, their structure and their development.

الديمغرافية: علم يتناول دراسة المجتمعات البشرية من حيث حجومها و بناها و تطورها و خصائصها العامة و لا سيما من النواحي الكمية.

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

Eclipse plug-in
The WikiQueer Editor plugin Eclipse WikiQueer 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 WikiQueer. It also downloads articles directly from WikiQueer and has highlighting.

GNU Emacs
There are a few Emacs major mode implementations available for editing MediaWiki syntax:


 * Mediawiki.el, available from launchpad, “… adds the ability to edit sites hosted on Mediawiki (including WikiQueer, of course).”
 * WikiQueer-mode.el (obsolete) is a simple major mode that mostly provides syntax highlighting for MediaWiki mark-up.
 * WikiQueer.el (obsolete) is a much more advanced major mode which provides WYSIWYG editing of WikiQueer 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.

Line Formatting
is now part of the default GNU Emacs distribution. The following information is retained for reference.

WikiQueer articles don't use line breaks. Because of this, you may want to install one of the following:
 * longlines.el — implements “word wrap” functionality for Emacs ( is now part of GNU Emacs). Installation instructions for.
 * screen-lines.el — redefines movement commands to operate in terms of screen lines as opposed to logical lines

Access Methods
WikiQueerfs.el can be used along with one of the aforementioned major modes, when using the virtual WikiQueer filesystem.

jEdit
For jEdit (Java-supporting OSes) there is a plugin available at http://www.djini.de/software/mwjed/. Apart from providing syntax highlighting for WikiQueer markup, it can communicate directly with the WikiQueer website using the HttpClient component from the Jakarta Project. (Unavailable as of 2012-03-20.)

Kate/KWrite
For Kate (for GNU/Linux KDE desktop), rules for syntax highlighting are provided by the XML file on Wikimedia Commons kate-highlighting. It recognizes HTML tags and entities, wiki control characters, templates, variables, keywords, links, section titles, tables and  sections.

To install this template, copy it to your home directory of KDE  for per user settings or a global settings:


 * Mostly, put it on.
 * on Ubuntu Linux, use.
 * on OpenSUSE-Linux for instance.

There's also an import tool :.

In recent editions of Kate, MediaWiki syntax highlighting is included by default. This can be configured by choosing  and select "Markup/MediaWiki" in the drop-down menu.

As checked on version 3.8.5 (KDE 4.8.5), Kate will automatically wrap lines when they are longer than a specified number of characters (default ). This auto-wrap functionality can be disabled by setting the "Line Length Limit:" to zero in Settings → Configure Kate → Open/Save.

gedit
gedit is a cross-platform, free software text editor that comes bundled with Ubuntu Linux by default. There is a GPL-licensed MediaWiki syntax highlight mode provided here (French). You can download, unzip, and copy the language file to the correct folder, or you can run the following in a GNU/Linux shell:


 * For gedit 2.x:


 * For gedit 3.x:

NoteTab
A Clip Library plugin for the NoteTab (Windows) text editor contains some functions to automate Wiki markup.

SubEthaEdit
A syntax highlighting mode is available for SubEthaEdit (Mac OS X) as well. After downloading the mode bundle, drop it in  (system-wide) or   (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 .WikiQueer extension.

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, or view this shell script that downloads and installs it. . The bundle does syntax highlighting, code completion, and other actions.

For Sublime Text 2 users, note that you may enable this bundle as well, since Sublime Text 2 supports TextMate bundles.

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.

Vim
Please feel free to contribute improvements to the below scripts, or check the vim-devel list if anyone has requested the upload of mediawiki.vim Syntax & FileType plugin. If not, request it and/or post the reasons why they are not here. (As of 16 November 2011, it is not in the Vim source control tree's "syntax/" directory.)

The below scripts are also posted in the vim.org script collection, where they are occasionally updated (but not since 2011-11-17) 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.

$HOME/.vim/syntax/mediawiki.vim
To make Vim support the MediaWiki markup used on WikiQueer (basically syntax highlighting), save the following lines to "~/.vim/syntax/mediawiki.vim" or "vimfiles\syntax\mediawiki.vim". If any of the directories above don't exist you may create them (the Unix/Linux command is mkdir).

When using Vim in Windows, it's preferable to create and save mediawiki.vim in Vim itself, otherwise the file may become broken.

Basic FileType Detection
To autodetect files ending in ".wiki", add the following lines to ".vim/ftdetect/mediawiki.vim" or "vimfiles\ftdetect\mediawiki.vim</tt>" (or create the file if it doesn't exist):

Alternatively, the command ":setf mediawiki</tt>" will temporarily set the syntax for the current file.

Mozex Firefox Extension Fix
If you use the Mozex Firefox extension, Mozex creates a temporary file ending in ".txt</tt>" rather than ".wiki</tt>" 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 mediawiki"

A complete editor command can look some thing like that

gnome-terminal -e "vim -c 'setf mediawiki' $1"

Adapt to Media Wiki's Lines without Line Breaks
WikiQueer 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/mediawiki.vim</tt>" or "vimfiles\ftplugin\mediawiki.vim</tt>" to make it as you may be used to from Notepad:

Additional Gimmicks
Additional to that you may want to save the following lines to "~/.vim/ftplugin/mediawiki.vim</tt>" or "vimfiles\ftplugin\mediawiki.vim</tt>" for some more gimmicks (you may need to put "filetype plugin on</tt>" in your ):

Dealing with special characters
Text on WikiQueer is encoded using the UTF-8 character set, which allows the use of many non-English 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 non-English 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.

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).