Help:Text editor support

Editing Wikipedia articles using a full-fledged text editor is often more convenient than a web browser's standard text area. Text editors provide facilities that are very useful for writing and editing articles (especially long articles), such as spell checking, search and replace, macros, syntax highlighting, and alphabetic sorting. They also provide a quick and easy way of saving a local backup copy of an article, possibly for future offline editing. wikEd for Wikipedia (Preferences > Gadgets > Editing) supports some of these features, and some browsers support spell-checking. In any case, you can select Wikipedia VisualEditor for a visual editing, in your user preferences.

This page contains pointers for adapting several external and in-browser text editors to editing Wikipedia articles.

Manual method
A "manual" way of editing in an external GUI text editor is to use copy and paste. Some text editors do not support, or may not be set up to support, various special characters—Chinese characters, non-Latin letters, mathematical symbols, and so on—they are typically replaced with a character that renders as a square. Check in a preview that your editor has not mangled any special characters before saving the edited page. A word processor may also be used, and may be less likely to mishandle special characters.
 * 1) Open the Wikipedia edit window for the article or section as normally in browser (click the Edit tab of a page or section, or use the keyboard shortcut Shift)
 * 2) Select the entire content of the browser text area (as with Ctrl or Cmd), copy it (to the clipboard; Ctrl), then paste (Ctrl) it into an external editor window
 * 3) Perform the editing and copy the text editor contents
 * 4) Select the browser text area contents so that they are overwritten, then paste the edited text back
 * 5) Preview and check the edited page before saving it.

For some browser/editor software combinations, there are more efficient methods:

Chrome and Firefox

 * GhostText (at this website or, for Firefox, added via Tools > Add-ons) opens the text box from your Chrome or Firefox Wikipedia window in a supported external editor (trialware Sublime Text, or open source Atom, VS Code, or Vim only), and keeps the browser and external text in sync during editing.

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:


 * It's All Text!, supports nonblocking editing and UTF-8 encoding. Note: If you also want syntax highlighting in your edit box, this addon may be incompatible with the highlighting in, but works with the highlighting in . (See below for highlighting within Vim.) Note: Stopped working in Firefox 57+.
 * Vimperator and Pentadactyl have a shortcut in Insert mode that allows external text editing (the default is Ctrl+i). Note: Stopped working in Firefox 57+.
 * GhostText. An extension for both Chrome and Firefox (including Quantum) where everything that you type in your editor appears instantly in the web-browser. Requires installing an editor plugin separately.
 * textern Another Firefox-Quantum-compatible replacement for It's all Text. In addition to the addon, it requires installing a server separately. Only supports Linux.
 * MozEx. The official package does not support editing UTF-8-encoded documents and does not install properly in Mozilla Firefox. However, the development version does not have these problems. A quick MozEx tutorial is available.
 * ViewSourceWith provides similar functionality vis-à-vis the text editing.
 * TextArea Sputnik, supports nonblocking editing and different encodings in an external editor. (You may see question marks in an edit textbox unrelated to the content you are editing (for example, the Unicode grapheme and other glyphs at the bottom), but your edits won't destroy the characters.)


 * withExEditor supports nonblocking editing in an external editor. As of this writing, it is common for other external editor plugins (It's All Text, ViewSourceWith) to not support multi-process (aka e10s) Firefox, whereas withExEditor does.

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.

Certain Firefox forks such as Pale Moon and Waterfox support legacy add-ons. Starting with Firefox 57, all add-ons must be based on the WebExtensions API in order to run.

Use It's All Text! to invoke an external editor
When the It's All Text! Firefox extension has been installed, a little blue edit button appears in 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 macOS, 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. Alternately, 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 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 in Vim, but not in 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

Using Vim in macOS
To get It's All Text to work nicely with Vim in the Mac, you need to install Macvim. When MacVim is installed, a script called mvim is also added. You need to tell It's All Text to use this script and not the MacVim.app file. A good place to keep it is in the same folder your MacVim.app file is (Applications by default).

Lynx
Lynx allows editing text area content with an external editor. When the cursor is in the text area, one can type Ctrl and E &mdash; or Ctrl and E to invoke a text editor. In addition, Lynx accepts a user-definable key-binding (normally not bound) to invoke the external editor. Some packagers may assign a user-definable binding in Lynx's configuration file.

Do not wrap
After saving the file in an external editor, quitting it and returning to Lynx, answer "no" to the Lynx question "Wrap lines to fit displayed area? (n)" by pressing the N key; answering "yes" will otherwise have Lynx wrap lines with normal carriage returns, which will break the document structure. Using article preview is strongly encouraged.

Line and paragraph breaking
Lynx built-in hard limits line length. In version 2.8.3, find this line in :
 * #define MAX_LINE 1024

This can be modified to a longer length (e.g. 8192) and recompiled. If you are unable to recompile Lynx, the following are workaround suggestions.

Lynx is prone to breaking lines longer than 1023 characters: When this happens, a large paragraph with lots of reference data may easily become broken, and articles saved like that may take at best a slightly inconsistent appearance; at worst, complex articles might lose their structure.

The character length limit is dependent on maximum buffer length set for a line, the default size of which is 1023 characters; this behaviour can be observed when moving the cursor to a text area line exceeding the limit, whereby Lynx will issue an alert: "Form field value exceeds buffer length! Trim the tail."

Even if a paragraph of article text on its face is not very long, it may still contain multiple references along with extensive amounts of related code and data for them, which makes an actual paragraph in article code much longer, and in some cases, well beyond the length of the 1023-character limit. When a line of text exceeds that limit and a text file is sent back to the Lynx textarea, Lynx will yield an error message: "Alert! Very long lines have been wrapped!". In such a case it's best not to save article content before such issues have been mitigated.

Therefore, article editors should be careful to follow the character length of longer lines, and where (usually) possible, insert strategic linebreaks with carriage returns (not HTML  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 Wikipedia 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);
 * Other editors 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 column'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.

Encoding
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.

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 as 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 Wikipedia. The display character set can be different, such as, but editable text will always be in.

In Windows, the display font should be Lucida Console instead of 'Raster fonts', as Lucida Console supports a greater amount of characters. The display font can be changed in window properties: In Windows XP, click the Lynx window icon (to the left of the title), choose Properties, and switch to the Font tab, which typically lists only Raster fonts and Lucida Console.

Lynx configuration files
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 in these old Windows versions does not support the Unix Line Feed.

  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 like Disk Cleanup.

Lynx Option file 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. The config file may occasionally not contain a specific option, but it can be added by the user.

Defaults to reconsider
The following options are often found as defaults in Lynx binaries compiled for Windows and might not meet formatting conventions used in Wikipedia. These options can be edited from  and are usually not specified in the Options page. Before editing, back up the file and rename it to, for example.

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 Wikipedia 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

Editing
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 stated above. And only since 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 the double quotes ^

Colour issues
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.

External editor feature
For MediaWiki Version 1.5 through 1.21, the software allowed you to edit any resource using any external tool. See Manual:External editors for details. This was removed during the currency of version 1.22

Conkeror
Conkeror can edit text boxes using an external editor by pressing Ctrl on a focused text box. Details on setting up this feature can be found on the External Editing page from the Conkeror website.

dwb
dwb allows editing a text area with an external editor by typing Ctrl when the cursor is in the text area. This key-binding can be changed on the  page under the   option, and the editor is defined on the   page.

elinks
The text-only browser elinks also provides a function to edit text areas. The key combination Ctrl calls an external editor, e.g. Vim. This allows also to use syntax highlighting, edit functions, spelling corrections and saving local copies.

Luakit
Luakit is able to edit text boxes using an external editor by pressing Ctrl on the focused text box. and  Lua modules powers the external editor functionality. User configuration is done by editing a  file and key bindings are changed with the   and   functions.

Nyxt
Nyxt is able to open an external editor on a current input field. The default keymap is  when using CUA keybindings. The editor path can be changed by configuring the  browser slot. The  command is used to open an editor.

qutebrowser
qutebrowser can open an external editor on a selected text area by typing Ctrl or by using the  command. Settings can be changed using the  command, with the editor defined in the   section. The key-binding can be changed by using  in   or with the   command.

Vieb
Vieb can open an external editor on a focused input field by typing Ctrl while in Insert mode. To change the mapping for the action, use the  command on the   action. To change the editor, use the  command.

vimb
vimb is able to open an external editor on a hinted form area by typing  or by pressing Ctrl on a form field while in Input Mode. The editor is defined by changing the  setting and changing the key mapping is done by using   to change mappings. Note that there are various key mapping modes for mapping commands.

vimprobable
vimprobable can open text boxes in an external editor by typing Ctrl while in Insert Mode. User configuration is done by editing a  file. To change the key binding, use the  command on the   function. To define a different editor, use the  command to change the   URI schema.

w3m
w3m opens an external editor for text areas by default. To change the external editor, press  to open the Options screen and change the Editor field. If the Editor field is left blank, w3m will use the  environment variable.

webmacs
webmacs can edit text fields using an external editor by pressing Ctrl e on a selected text field. Configuring the external editor is done by editing  found in the   directory and changing the   variable. The  and   functions define and undefine a command to a keymap respectively.

xombrero
xombrero is able to edit a selected text element in an external editor by pressing Ctrl while in Insert Mode or by entering the  command. Settings can be changed by editing a  file. To change the key binding, create a  entry for the   command. The editor is defined by creating an entry for the  setting.

Command-line tools
Some command line tools allow you to download articles, edit them using your favorite text editor, and upload the edited articles back into 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. Meta:WWW::Mediawiki::Client has more information. 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 managing 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.
 * mw:Manual:Pywikibot 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 transmitting titles in UTF-8 wrongly, 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 mw:Manual:Pywikibot):

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

Atom
Atom requires at least one of the two packages to support syntax highlighting. Install packages using Command-, - Install and search for:
 * language-mediawiki
 * language-markdown

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


 * mediawiki.el on github. “… adds the ability to edit sites hosted on Mediawiki (including Wikipedia, of course).”
 * wikitext-mode.el, see WikitextMode on EmacsWiki. Derived from WikipediaMode v.0.3.3.  Source is available but documentation has link rotted.
 * wikipedia-mode.el (obsolete) is a simple major mode that mostly provides syntax highlighting for MediaWiki mark-up.
 * wikipedia.el (obsolete) is a much more advanced major mode. It provides WYSIWYG editor for 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.

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

Wikipedia 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
wikipediafs.el can be used along with one of the aforementioned major modes, when using the virtual Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia markup, it can communicate directly with the Wikipedia website using the HttpClient component from the Jakarta Project. (Unavailable as of 2012-03-20.)

Kate/KWrite
Kate (text editor on KDE framework) supports MediaWiki syntax highlighting by default. Choose. It recognizes everything in default markup:
 * HTML tags and entities
 * Wiki control characters
 * Templates
 * Variables
 * Keywords
 * Links
 * Section titles
 * Tables
 *  sections
 * Wiki tags

Highlighting can be configured in  and select "Markup/MediaWiki" in the drop-down menu.

There is also a highlighting import tool:.

Kate dynamically wraps lines.

gedit
gedit is a cross-platform, free software text editor that comes bundled with Ubuntu Linux by default. A GPL-licensed MediaWiki syntax highlight mode is shipped by default with gedit 3.10 and newer.

For older versions, you can download it at https://github.com/jpfleury/gedit-mediawiki/archive/master.zip, 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:

To select the MediaWiki syntax highlight mode, go to the gedit menu View > Highlight Mode > Others and select MediaWiki.

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 (macOS) 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 .Wikipedia extension.

TextMate
A "MediaWiki" bundle is available in the TextMate for macOS bundle subversion repository. The bundle could ne enabled through the app preference pane GUI by checking a tickbox. To learn how to load this bundle manualy, 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.

Sublime Text
Mediawiker is a Sublime Text package that enables editing MediaWiki pages.

More information about the plugin and its configuration can be found in the mediawiker wiki.

For Wikipedia it is necessary to set the https to true, inserting it in the package global or user configuration. An example configuration for English Wikipedia is the following:

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-dev 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. , 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 Wikipedia (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 ).

A raw mediawiki.vim file for easy downloading exists on GitHub: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chikamichi/mediawiki.vim/master/syntax/mediawiki.vim

When using Vim in Windows, creating and saving mediawiki.vim in Vim itself is preferable, otherwise the file may break.

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

A raw mediawiki.vim file for easy downloading exists on GitHub: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chikamichi/mediawiki.vim/master/ftdetect/mediawiki.vim

Alternatively, the command " :setf mediawiki " 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 "" rather than "" 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 MediaWiki lines without line breaks
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/mediawiki.vim " or " vimfiles\ftplugin\mediawiki.vim " 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 " or " vimfiles\ftplugin\mediawiki.vim " for some more gimmicks (you may need to put " filetype plugin on " in your ):

GVim Syntax menu
Add in Syntax menu the option Wiki

vim-mediawiki-editor
vim-mediawiki-editor can on copy articles directly from vim, display diff between changes version on the server and our etc.

Notepad++
Notepad++ is a free text and source code editor for Microsoft Windows. It allows users to create their own syntax highlighting scheme; users can customize a new scheme using the mediawiki markup scheme, or install an existing version provided by the Wikipedia user MjolnirPants.

Notepad++ supports plugins; there is a 2009 mediaWiki plugin for the 32-bit version that can be downloaded at http://www.cab.i24.cc/projects/wikieditor/.

LibreOffice Writer
The previous methods allow a Wikipedia Edit page to be processed more efficiently. LibreOffice (LO) Writer can be used for this purpose; but using LO Writer to convert a formatted document into Wikipedia edit format is also possible. This requires using styles and other LO features, explained in LO Writer Help > MediaWiki Formats; for example the Heading 2 style must be used if a heading is to be enclosed within a pair of "==". This is supported, at least, in LO 5 under Windows 10 with the appropriate 32- or 64-bit Java Runtime Environment (JRE) present and enabled in LO; the procedure is File > Export > MediaWiki (.txt). See Help:WordToWiki.

wikEd
wikEd is a full-featured in-browser text editor that adds enhanced text processing functions to Wikipedia and other MediaWiki edit pages (, wikEd works with Firefox, SeaMonkey, Safari and Google Chrome, but not with Internet Explorer or Opera).

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)
 * 1-click fixing common mistakes

wikEd can simply be enabled in Preferences::Gadgets (on wiki installations where wikEd is not installed as a gadget, a small code snippet can be pasted to your common.js page or it can be run locally as a Greasemonkey user script). For detailed installation instructions see the wikEd homepage.

QuickWikiEditor
With this Firefox add-on it is possible to make little edits to wiki-articles without having to leave or reload the page, so the flow in reading an article is barely disturbed. It is available at addons.mozilla.org.

Surfingkeys
Surfingkeys is a Chrome and Firefox extension that brings Vim-like keyboard shortcuts that can be customized using JavaScript. Among the list of features is a Vim editor powered by Ace.

To enter the Vim editor, press I and use a hint letter to pick an input box. Alternatively if a text box was selected via insert mode or mouse click, Ctrl opens the editor. For  and   elements, Enter saves the text. For  elements such as for editing a page, Ctrl will save the text. In all cases,  will also save the written text and Esc or   will leave the editor without saving changes.

wasavi
wasavi is an extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera that changes the textarea in a page to a Vim-like editor. Almost all Vim/ex commands are supported. To launch wasavi, press Ctrl to start the editor.

Dealing with special characters
Wikipedia encodes text using the UTF-8 character set, which allows using 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, using an editor that does not mangle these characters or replace them with question marks is very important. 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 your editor uses and replace any characters not included in this character set 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 editing an article with special characters using a new editor, using the "Show changes" button (next to "Show preview") to see exactly what your edit will change is a good idea. 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).