mediawiki-el

Related articles

• Emacs
• Help:Editing

mediawiki-el is an emacs major mode which is evolved from an old copy of mediawiki mode from wikipedia.org. It helps to edit remote wiki articles on wiki sites running mediawiki in emacs editor directly.

Configuration

After you install the package from AUR, open your emacs configuration file (usually, ~/.emacs) and add the following line in it.

(require 'mediawiki)

Then add the mediawiki sites to the configuration file. For example, the following line adds ArchWiki to it.

(setq mediawiki-site-alist
      (append '(("ArchWiki" "https://wiki.archlinux.org/" "username" "password" "Main page"))
              mediawiki-site-alist))

Where Archwiki is the name for the site. https://wiki.archlinux.org/ is the url of the site and username and password is your username and password of this site. Main Page is the default page opened when you connect to the site.

Other sites can also be added by appending the configuration list to the list variable mediawiki-site-alist.

Usage

After the configuration, you can use emacs to edit the wiki pages directly. Open your emacs and do the following to connect to the site.

M-x mediawiki-site RET {site name} RET

Now that you are connected, the default page should be opened. If you would rather edit another page. do the following to open it.

M-x mediawiki-open RET {page title} RET

Some useful keybindings are:

• C-x C-s – save this page
• C-c C-c – save this page and bury the buffer
• C-return – open the page under point for editing
• TAB – go to the next wiki link
• M-n – next page in the page ring
• M-p – previous page in the page ring
• M-g – reload the current page

Now enjoy editing wiki pages in emacs!

Tips and tricks

MediaWiki provies a hook to customize configuration. For example, if C-return does not work for you, you can redefine it easily:

(setq mediawiki-mode-hook
    (lambda ()
        (define-key mediawiki-mode-map (kbd "C-c RET") 'mediawiki-open-page-at-point)
))

Autofill off

Wikis do not autofill paragraphs. If you do so, it might confuse history diffs, and thus making them useless. So you would be better off turning the auto-fill feature completely off. Add to the hook the following line:

(setq mediawiki-mode-hook (lambda ()
                          ;; ...
                            (turn-off-auto-fill)
))

Specifying the browser

A convenient feature of Mediawiki is the mediawiki-browse function which let you see the result of the page in a web browser. The browser is chosen following the browse-url plugin. You can configure this behaviour. For example:

(setq browse-url-generic-program (executable-find (getenv "BROWSER"))
browse-url-browser-function 'browse-url-generic)

will use your environment browser, whereas

(setq browse-url-generic-program (executable-find "surf")
browse-url-browser-function 'browse-url-generic)

will specifically use the Surf browser.

See also

• MediaWikiMode