Editing Help:Text editor support (section)

=== Firefox ===
{{Update|section|reason=several of these add-ons are incompatible with recent (post-[[Quantum (Mozilla)|Quantum]]) versions of Firefox|date=February 2019}}
If you are using the [[Mozilla]] web browser, it is possible to configure an external editor for editing text areas, including the Wikipedia edit area. This then avoids the need to copy and paste the article text between browser and editor. Several solutions exist:

* '''[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/?src=ss It's All Text!]''', supports nonblocking editing and UTF-8 encoding.  '''Note:''' If you ''also'' want ''syntax highlighting'' in your edit box, this addon may be incompatible with the highlighting in {{myprefs|Beta features}}, but works with the highlighting in {{myprefs|Gadgets}}. (See below for highlighting ''within Vim''.) '''Note: Stopped working in Firefox 57+.'''
* '''[http://www.vimperator.org/vimperator Vimperator]''' and '''[http://dactyl.sourceforge.net/pentadactyl/ Pentadactyl]''' have a shortcut in Insert mode that allows external text editing (the default is '''[[Control key|Ctrl]]+i'''). '''Note: Stopped working in Firefox 57+.'''
* '''GhostText''', [[Help:Text editor support#GhostText|see above]]
* '''[https://github.com/jlebon/textern textern]'''  Another Firefox-Quantum-compatible replacement for ''It's all Text''. In addition to the [https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/textern/ addon], it requires installing a server separately. Only supports [[Linux]].
*'''MozEx.''' The [http://mozex.mozdev.org/ official package]{{dead}} does not support editing [[UTF-8]]-encoded documents and does not install properly in [[Mozilla Firefox]]. However, the [http://mozex.mozdev.org/development.html development version]{{dead}} does not have these problems. A quick [[Wikipedia:MozEx tutorial|MozEx tutorial]] is available.
*'''[http://dafizilla.sourceforge.net/viewsourcewith/ ViewSourceWith]''' provides similar functionality vis-à-vis the text editing.
* '''[http://lib.custis.ru/index.php/TextArea_Sputnik/en TextArea Sputnik]''', supports nonblocking editing and different encodings in an external editor. (You may see question marks in an edit textbox unrelated to the content you are editing (for example, the [[Unicode]] [[grapheme]] and other [[glyphs]] at the bottom), but your edits won't destroy the characters.)

* '''[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/withexeditor/ withExEditor]''' supports nonblocking editing in an external editor.  As of this writing, it is common for other external editor plugins (It's All Text, ViewSourceWith) to not support multi-process (aka e10s) Firefox, whereas withExEditor does.

With all these solutions, once you are done editing, you need to save in your editor, then click into the browser's text area and it is updated. You can then hit Preview. If you want to continue editing after the preview, hit Back in your browser, then work in your editor. Alternatively, you can hit Preview before you start editing for the first time, then work in your editor, save, preview, edit some more, save, preview etc., without the need for hitting Back in between.

Certain Firefox forks such as [[Pale Moon (web browser)|Pale Moon]] and [[Waterfox]] support legacy add-ons. Starting with Firefox 57, all add-ons must be based on the WebExtensions API in order to run.

====Use It's All Text! to invoke an external editor====
{{outdated}}
When the '''It's All Text!''' Firefox extension has been installed, a little blue edit button appears in the bottom right corner of the text area. Just click the button to open the contents of the text area in your editor.

However, before you can use ''It's All Text!'', you need to specify the path to your editor in the Preferences dialog box. The Preferences dialog opens automatically when you use ''It's All Text!'' for the first time, but you can open it manually as follows: Right click in the text area to open context menu; select "It's All Text" &rarr; "Preferences".

If your editor requires some other command line options in addition to the filename, use a shell script (.sh file in Linux and macOS, or .bat in Windows) to call your editor, and specify path to that script instead of calling your editor directly. In addition, you can add filename extension for wiki file type in Preferences dialog, in case your editor uses file type specific configuration.

Once the above is done, you can edit any text area in your editor by clicking at the Edit button at the lower-right corner of the text area. Alternately, you can right-click on the text area. From the "It's All Text" menu, you can choose which filename extension to use for editing.
Next time you use the blue edit button, the extension is the one you used last time.

After editing, just save the file from your editor. The contents are automatically copied to the text area in Firefox. To indicate this, the text area turns yellow briefly.

A temporary file is created for editing and is removed at the end. So if you want to preserve a text file for later editing, you can change the file name and/or save the file to another directory.

=====Using Vim or another console editor=====
Some macros may work in [[Vim_(text_editor)#Interface|Vim]], but not in [[Vim_(text_editor)#Interface|gVim]] for some reason (e.g., the macro to format text paragraphs). Or you just want to use Vim within an X terminal as you used to do, instead of using gVim. To invoke Vim within an X terminal window, you can write a shell script (see below) to invoke an X terminal and to run the <code>vim</code> command within that X terminal, or generally your preferred editor. Assume that the filename of this script is <code>wiki.edit.vim</code>, and that you put the script in the directory <code>/home_dir/bin/</code> so that the path of the script would be
<code>/home_dir/bin/wiki.edit.vim</code>
Put the above path in the Preferences box (instead of <code>/usr/bin/gvim</code>) of It's All Text. It should work. Note that <code>/home_dir/</code> is the complete path to your home directory from the root (<code>/</code>) directory; don't use <code>~/</code> (tilde) instead of <code>/home_dir/</code>; it won't work.
The listing of the script <code>wiki.edit.vim</code> is given below:
<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
#!/bin/sh

exec xterm -e ${VISUAL:=vim} "$@"
</syntaxhighlight>
Don't forget to make the file executable with <code>$ chmod +x wiki.edit.vim</code>

=====Using Vim in macOS=====
To get It's All Text to work nicely with Vim in the Mac, you need to install [http://code.google.com/p/macvim/ Macvim]. When MacVim is installed, a script called mvim is also added. You need to tell It's All Text to use this script and not the MacVim.app file. A good place to keep it is in the same folder your MacVim.app file is (Applications by default).