Topic on 2017 wikitext editor/Feedback

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T175634 Resolved

I have been trying the editor for few days. This is my opinion:

Good things:

1. Visually attractive
2. In categories, it's good to view the items of the category while you are editing
3. It's also good to see interwikis
4. It really pushes editors to make a short explanation of their edit
5. You don't have to go to the bottom of the page to click on the "publish" button

Things to improve:

1. Slow load of the editor
2. We lost the ability to use strange symbols (which are at the bottom at the original editor)
3. References cannot be segregated for an easier text-only-edit (I had a gadget for that)
4. It would be great to have a "Preview" button when you edit. Now, to preview, you have to click first to "publish". It is more complicated and not very logical.
5. It would be great, while editing, to be able to differentiate beetween blue links and red links (pages still missing)
6. It would be great to be able to copy (for later pasting) the title of the page
7. For templates, it also would be good to be able to preview articles using this template (as you do with the source editor)
8. Inability to make a null-edit to force page to update.
9. Inability to undo (at least with Google Chrome)

Thanks!

Hello, Paucabot, and thank you for this. Here are my questions about things to improve:

1. Slow load of the editor
   • The team is talking about a performance audit.
2. We lost the ability to use strange symbols (which are at the bottom at the original editor)
   • Look for the omega character (Ω) in the toolbar. The first section is customizable at MediaWiki:Visualeditor-quick-access-characters.json.
3. References cannot be segregated for an easier text-only-edit (I had a gadget for that)
   • Can you please give me a link to the gadget? Also, you may be interested in the Beta Feature for m:Community Tech/Wikitext editor syntax highlighting.
4. It would be great to have a "Preview" button when you edit. Now, to preview, you have to click first to "publish". It is more complicated and not very logical.
   • The team agrees that this is not very logical. They have not (yet) decided exactly how to change it.
5. It would be great, while editing, to be able to differentiate beetween blue links and red links (pages still missing)
   • How would you display this to the editor?
6. It would be great to be able to copy (for later pasting) the title of the page
   • See phab:T156047.
7. For templates, it also would be good to be able to preview articles using this tmplate (as you do with the source editor)
   • I believe that this is planned, but "not soon".
8. Inability to make a null-edit to force page to update.
   • You can, but it's strange. You type a character, remove that character, and then save the page.
9. Inability to undo (at least with Google Chrome)
   • Is this when you use the keyboard command (e.g., Command-Z) or when you use the button in the toolbar?

Thanks Whatamidoing (WMF) for your reply.

1. Ok.
2. Ok.
3. ca:MediaWiki:Gadget-SegregaRefs.js
4. Ok.
5. Maybe with the same colours than in the preview?
6. Thanks.
7. Ok.
8. Ok, but it's still more complicated then the other way. Is it made on purpose?
9. When I use right-click on the mouse. It does work with the shortcut and with the button in the toolbar.

Gadgets: Gadgets have to be re-written to work in VisualEditor (whether you're using the visual or the wikitext modes). See VisualEditor/Gadgets and its subpages to get started. The documentation isn't great, and I encourage you to boldly improve it as you go.

Link colors: Syntax highlighting is on the way. I don't know if it currently labels blue links and red links, though. It feels like the kind of thing that should be possible in VisualEditor's 2017 wikitext mode. @DHorn (WMF) could tell us whether that's a supported use case.

Null edits: It's not intentional, but it's not likely to be improved very soon, either.

Mouse support: I don't think that mouse-based commands are very well supported, and they depend a lot upon OS/browser interactions. You could file a Phab task with the request, if you wanted (or post your OS/browser/anything else that seems relevant, and I'll file it).

My browser is Google Chrome 58 64-bit with Ubuntu Linux.

One last thing I have just remembered: It was very handy to get the browser to remember edit summaries: you could autocomplete them. Now, with this editor, it won't. Is it easy to get that behaviour to work with this new editor?

Thanks in advance.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T175634

I pinged you in this task for the "undo" problem.

[deleted]

Auto-completing edit summaries is something that I'd love to see, but which turns out to depend upon your web browser, and apparently web browsers don't want to auto-complete that form. See phab:T50274 and related tasks for some of the ideas that they're thinking about.