User:Cacycle/wikEd help

This is the help page for wikEd, a full-featured in-browser text editor that adds enhanced text processing functions to Wikipedia and other MediaWiki edit pages.

Please post bug reports or feature requests to the wiked discussion page.



Enabling and disabling wikEd


To disable or re-enable wikEd, click the grayed out wikEd logo displayed the very top right of any wiki page, right next to the Log out link (not available on the user Preferences pages).

Quick tutorial
Most buttons will work as expected and resemble those in your regular text processing program. However, wikEd is sometimes a bit special. This is largely because the program uses the browser's built-in rich-text editing interface (more details can be found below). wikEd is launched immediately when [edit] is clicked on any article, provided that you have it correctly installed, it is not disabled, and you use a supported browser.

Formatted text
Unlike in the standard editing window, when you paste formatted text, links stay links, tables stay tables, and strange text formatting stays as it is. Any such formatting will be stripped from the article when you save the page (only the raw text will be kept) unless you convert the formatting (see next section). If you want to get rid of text formatting prior to saving the page, you can press the textify button.

Converting to wiki code
If you want to keep a certain formatting, a link, or a table, you can convert the formatted pasted text into wiki code by pushing the wikify button. Any editing button will automatically wikify the text to be changed.

Updating the syntax highlighting
For technical reasons, the syntax highlighting cannot be updated automatically. If you add text, it might therefore be displayed in a wrong color or formatting. Simply push the textify  or wikify button  to update the syntax highlighting. This also updates the targets for internal and external links in the text (ctrl-click to open them in a new window or tab).

Most buttons (including the three previous ones) work on the whole text if no text is selected and on the selection only if you have text selected.

Control buttons
The button bar to the right has the control buttons. With these buttons you can switch between the standard editing window and wikEd, turn off syntax highlighting, turn off the standard toolbar, or switch to full-screen mode. If you push any of these buttons, its setting will be saved in a cookie and it affects all new pages and is kept for future sessions.

wikEd main switch, version info, and error indicator
The following wikEd status indicator logos below are displayed at the top of the page next to the logout link. Hovering over the logo gives you the current version info. wikEd checks every 20 h for updates and automatically updates. You can check for the latest version and update manually by pressing Shift and click the Reload button or press Shift-Ctrl-R (technically, updating is simply a page reload after clearing the browser's cache for this page).

Collapsing button bars
The button bars above the edit window have a grip area to collapse them. This can be useful with low screen resolutions like 600×800 or 1024×768 pixels:

↔ ↔

Click the grip to collapse the bar. Move the mouse cursor over the grip to expand the bar temporarily. Click the grip again to re-expand the bar.

wikEd control buttons


This setting of the toggle buttons is stored and affects all newly opened pages. Hovering over the background gives the version info, similar to main switch on top of the page.

Syntax highlighting of special characters
wikEd highlights certain special Unicode characters so that they are distinguishable from their standard versions. Hover over the highlighted character for their name.

Double edit notice
This is a wikEd feature that duplicates edit notices and warnings from the top of edit pages right above the editing area in order to make them visible after wikEd's automatic scrolling to the edit area. This feature can be disabled using the  customization setting; please see the wikEd customization page for details.

wikEd is slow
On very slow computers or when using outdated browsers, it is possible to experience delays when editing extremely long articles. In these cases you can can turn off syntax highlighting by pushing the button. Also, you might want to avoid edit buttons for whole text selections and regular expression searches ( button).

wikEd does not load
You have followed the installation instructions on the main page, but the wikEd logo is not displayed on top of the pages next to the log out link and the wikEd buttons do not appear on edit pages. Please try the following:


 * Refresh your browser cache: hold down Shift while clicking Reload (or press Ctrl-Shift-R)
 * Enable JavaScript in your browser (Tools → Options → Content → Enable JavaScript in Firefox)
 * If installed as a user script on a User:YourUsername/your_skin.js page make sure that you are using the right skin or move the loading code to User:YourUsername/common.js, see wikEd installation
 * If you are using wikEd on a non-Wikipedia installation check if $wgAllowUserJs is has been set to true in the MediaWiki initialization file LocalSettings.php by an administrator
 * Check the JavaScript Error Console (under Tools in Firefox) for error messages. If there is an error message caused by wikEd please report to the wikEd discussion page.

All wikEd buttons are gone
The wikEd logo on top of the page is displayed in grey and the wikEd buttons are not shown on edit pages.


 * You have disabled wikEd by clicking the logo on top of the page. Click the logo again to re-enable wikEd.

The wikEd formatting buttons are gone
The wikEd control buttons are displayed on edit pages, but all other button bars are gone.


 * You have temporarily disabled wikEd by clicking the [[Image:wikEd_logo.png]] control button above the edit field. Click the button again to turn wikEd back on. Please remember that the setting of this button is saved and kept for all windows and tabs.

Error: invalid range in character class
You have installed wikEd by pasting the complete code to your wiki. wikEd does not load at all and the browser's error console shows the following error: "Error: invalid range in character class". When you check the header text of the copied wikEd code for the following sentence: "The code has to be saved as UTF-8 in your editor to preserve Unicode characters like ♥ (heart)" the "♥" symbol is replaced by a "?".

The reason is that you lost the Unicode character formatting when copying the code to your wiki. Use a UTF-8-capable text editor when you paste the code to your wiki and specify UTF-8 as your file format when you save your text file.

Greasemonkey update messages
If you experience repeated update messages without being able to actually update, then you might have two competing duplicate versions of wikEd installed.

Solution: Please go to Firefox Tools - Add-ons - wikEd (no version number) and click remove. Then update or reinstall wikEd by clicking [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Cacycle/wikEd.user.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript here].

Can I have only some wikEd features
Can I have only some wikEd features, e.g. only syntax highlighting, no syntax highlighting, only the search functions?

There is no easy way to get only some wikEd features as most features are highly interdependent. However, wikEd is configurable and you could try to set the respective presets (e.g. no syntax highlighting), see the customization section. Experienced programmers could try to dissect or to remove certain features, but such a version would not be updated automatically with bugfixes and new features. Feel free to suggest new configuration options on the wikEd talk page after having used wikEd for a few days (to get the feeling...).

Automatic syntax highlighting
A common feature request is the automatic updating of the syntax highlighting while typing ("live syntax highlighting").

This cannot be easily implemented for technical reasons. Every automatic change to the edit frame either erases or messes up the undo history. In order to get live syntax highlighting, the whole undo/redo system and the whole editing logic of the browser's rich text interface would have to be simulated from scratch in JavaScript. Please see this Firefox bug report and vote for it.

WYSIWYG

 *  Please also read an extended user essay about this under User:Cacycle/WYSIWYG (under construction)

A common feature request is to make wikEd a true WYSIWYG editor.

While this sounds like a good idea at first, it is actually a step backwards. It would be very simple to add WYSIWYG for the basic formatting like bold or italic. But for even slightly more advanced formatting, things turn complicated:


 * A true WYSIWYG editor has to hide and encapsulate any existing wikicode from direct editing
 * Therefore, images, tables, templates, wiki links, external links, and even simple span or div tags with parameters, need a separate (popup) editor to edit their hidden content
 * Pasting formatted text screws up formatting, especially the heading order
 * Existing, syntactically incorrect text on the page can disappear from editing, and, in the worst case, get lost on saving and/or corrupt the existing article text

Under real-world conditions with typical wiki content, WYSIWYG editing is more confusing and time consuming than the simple wiki-way of structure-oriented editing.

wikEd tries to bring together the best of both worlds in something also known as WYSIWYM – what you see is what you mean:


 * A simple (MS Word-like) user interface with advanced text editing features like search and replace (also good for learning the wiki code)
 * The structure-oriented classic text field, peppered up with syntax highlighting and on-page preview
 * Text editing without any popup forms

See also:


 * What you see is Wiki - Questioning WYSIWYG in the Internet Age

wikEd design philosophy
The design philosophy of wikEd is:


 * Simple, small, and intuitive user interface (no navigation through complex menu structures, no popups, special buttons must be added as plugins)
 * Cross site compatibility between all MediaWiki installations (not only Wikipedia)
 * Multi-language support
 * Multi-browser support by using cross-browser standards-compatible code
 * Use of the browser-internal rich-text editor

Please post bug reports or feature requests to the wikEd discussion page.

Non-breaking spaces
WikEd will convert an otherwise invisible non-breaking space into its HTML reference when the user enters edit mode, automatically. This edit only converts ones that are present&mdash;it does not insert new ones. Such non-breaking spaces are usually inserted unintentionally by a previous editor. A subsequent edit can or should remove them (according to WP:NBSP).