Forum:Which external editor do you use?

Although I primarily use the built in source markup editor here at Wikia, I find that Scintilla is useful when working on JavaScript. I find that CSS rarely becomes complex enough to warrant an external editor.

When browsing other wikis in search of inspiration I often come across promising templates that seem to be optimized for minimum byte count but sub-optimal for human parsing. (I suspect authors do this to avoid a newline creeping in where it is not wanted.) viz. In such cases I laboriously add newlines and indentation while being careful not to insert a newline or white space in between elements or in between parser functions. e.g. I wonder how many find the markup below easier to parse by eye than the markup above? (They are identical.) 
 * FYI: the syntax  is a semantic annotation markup, it is not a malformed intra-wiki link.

Maybe I am alone in thinking this way but, a complex template that is not easily interpreted by another contributor is not in the spirit of a collaborative wiki community.

So I am wondering:
 * What external editor are you using for wiki markup?
 * If you are a fan of Scintilla then can you point me to a lang.properties file for the MediaWiki markup language?
 * Are there any tips or tricks for "pretty" or "tidy" views of such ugly template/parser function/semantic annotations as you see above.

-najevi 04:13, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * FWIW: I currently use SciTE Version 1.77-wbd-1 (Dec 7 2008 15:34:00) by Neil Hodgson. It supports 32 "languages" via a lang.properties file for each language. However, I have not attempted to integrate SciTE with the "use external editor" user preference. In fact, now that I am looking for it, I find no help page on the subject of using an external editor!

I use: Firefox + Its all Text! + Notepad++ --Uberfuzzy 09:59, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Easiest is this: Often, complicated coding makes wikicode hard to read. -- ◄mendel► 03:32, 3 August 2009 (UTC) I sometimes copy and paste text into notepad+ for search and replace edits on lists, but other than that, I'm using the plain editbox. -- ◄mendel► 03:34, 3 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you Mendel, I agree that beyond about two levels of cascading #if:'s a #switch: makes for easier reading. However, before we even get to the point of interpreting the original purpose/function of some wiki markup code, the problem I am posting about here is that of deciphering the WML created by various users.
 * In an ideal world I might click some button labeled [WML Tidy] and auto-magic-ally the template code (or JavaScript or CSS or whatever else) would leap into a heavily indented format that is easy for a visitor to parse by eye.
 * Realizing that idea to be a pipe-dream, I am wondering what external editors are popular. So far Notepad++ has received mention twice. -najevi 13:41, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I use Word, but never have surveyed the other choices- it just happened to be the closest hammer in reach that did what I wanted. I use it because it has a regular expression search and replace (inconveniently not using regex expressions), and you can pretty easily record programmable macros for complex transformations (preparation or a list for a bot run of some sort).  These features are common and much more convenient in software editors (like emacs and vi) but I haven't used those in eons and besides I don't know any of our other contributors that would be comfortable with them.  So I just refer to Word if ever.


 * Small warning on SMW forms extension by the way: if you attempt to make #declare: pretty with whitespace, note that you can add as much whitespace as you like to the left of each = sign. You may not add spaces to the right of the = or it will not evaluate.  This may or may not get fixed in a future version of SMW forms.  16:37, 5 August 2009 (UTC)