Hi everyone,
WMF's Community Tech team team is happy to announce that Wikitext Editor Syntax Highlighting has been released as a beta feature today on all LTR Wikimedia projects!
Syntax Highlighting was the #6 request in this year's Community Wishlist Survey [1] -- a way to help editors parse the wikitext in the edit window by using color, bolding, italics and size to make it easier to see which parts are article text, and which are links, templates, tags and headings.
It's easy to separate the link target from the actual link text, section headings are bigger, and adding bold and italics actually changes the way it looks in the edit window. Plus -- thanks to the amazing performance optimization done by volunteer developer Pastakhov -- it loads a lot faster than previous versions of syntax highlighting.
Unfortunately, the feature isn't available in RTL languages yet; we're working on some bugs, and we'll release it as soon as we can. We're also hoping to improve the Syntax Highlighting performance for people who also use the "New wikitext mode" Beta feature.
You can find Syntax Highlighting under the Beta features tab in Preferences. I hope you all love it and find it useful! If you've got feedback, you can click on the Discussion link in Beta features, or leave comments and questions on the Community Tech project talk page. [2] Thanks!
Danny Horn Senior Product Manager WMF Community Tech
[1] Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Results
[2] Project talk page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Tech/Wikitext_editor_syntax_h...