[Mediawiki-l] Editing

[Terry Jones]

Hi all. I've used a few different wikis now, most recently mediawiki
(which I enjoy the most).

One thing that detracts greatly from the whole experience is the
poverty of editing in a browser form.  Given the popularity of wikis,
I imagine people must have addressed this.

If you're used to editing in notepad, maybe you find working on wiki
entries in a web browser form just fine. But if you're used to
something like emacs (my case), then doing any serious work on a wiki
is like pulling teeth. And that's a great shame because there are
compelling reasons to do serious work with a wiki.

How do people who are attached to their editors resolve this?

My best effort has been to install w3m on the OS (GNU/Linux, Mac OS X)
and then install the w3m mode in emacs. That means I can browse to a
wiki page inside emacs and it looks more or less ok. I can do the
editing using emacs and can then send the page back. By turning on
cookie processing in w3m, the wiki knows who is making the edits.

Do other people have better solutions to this?

Do people have opinions about the best form-editing available in a
browser? E.g., is editing in a form inside mozilla more or less
pleasant/configurable than doing so in opera? Is anyone aware of a
browser that can be (preferably selectively) configured to call out to
an external program to do editing? (E.g., I can configure opera to pop
an emacs mail-sending window when I click on a mailto link). Ideally,
one could configure the browser so that if the current URL matched a
certain regex then clicking in a textarea widget would cause an
external program to be run to handle the edit. Does this exist?

I have a second question, which I'll save for the next email.

Regards,
Terry.