Editing Help:Text editor support (section)

===Manual method===

A "manual" way of editing in an external [[GUI]] text editor is to use [[Cut,_copy_and_paste#Copy_and_paste|copy and paste]]. Some text editors do not support, or may not be set up to support, various [[#Dealing_with_special_characters|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.<!--my personal experience: Notepad++ for Windows has mangled characters, LibreOffice Writer hasn't, for the same page. There is no problem with file format as we are not saving the word processor file. pol098-->
# 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_shortcuts|keyboard shortcut]] {{key press|Shift|Alt|E}})
# Select the entire content of the browser text area (as with {{key press|Ctrl|A}} or {{key press|Cmd|A}}), copy it (to the clipboard; {{key press|Ctrl|C}}), then paste ({{key press|Ctrl|V}}) it into an external editor window
# Perform the editing and copy the text editor contents
# Select the browser text area contents so that they are overwritten, then paste the edited text back
# Preview and check the edited page before saving it.

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