Topic on 2017 wikitext editor/Feedback

• Writing no-break spaces in the new editor doesn’t work. I get usual spaces when I type a no-break space. No-break spaces do work in other MediaWiki editors, including the previous wikitext editor and the translation tool which is used on MediaWiki.org and Meta. No-break spaces can be typed with some keyboard layouts including mine (Bépo, which is a Dvorak-like for French; also the fr-oss layout with AltGr-Shift-Space). We can still use the HTML entity   but in my case it’s harder to write, and it makes the code uglier.
• On some pages on fr.wikiversity (example of such a page), the cursor is not at the right place, it is shifted. To make editing comfortable, I have to open the browser inspector and edit manually the .ve-init-mw-desktopArticleTarget .ve-ui-mwWikitextSurface .ve-ce-attachedRootNode rule so that it has the same padding as the .ve-init-mw-desktopArticleTarget .CodeMirror rule.

Thank you for reading and dealing with it.

• This request is documented at phab:T53045.
• Are you using a monospace font for editing? Using a variable-width font (like Times or Arial) causes problems with the CodeMirror syntax highlighting tool.

• No it’s not. This request talks about creating a shortcut to insert no-break spaces. I’m talking about allowing to write no-break spaces when your keyboard layout already allows you to write no-break spaces. What I’m talking about is something that works with the most stupid text editor you can have. What is asked for on phab:T53045 is an advanced feature you usually have on a word processor which is usually quite an important piece of software. To my mind you shouldn’t deal with phab:T53045 but you should deal with my request. No-break space is a special character among many others; if you want to type one you should either have it on your keyboard layout (like me) or find it in a character table. However, whereas many important keyboard layout don’t offer the no-break space, it might still be important to type no-break spaces in formatted texts, but for the French case, MediaWiki already puts no-break spaces in the most important places (notably before colons and semicolons). But currently it’s simply not possible to type a no-break space even if you have it on your keyboard layout, and it’s pretty weird. It is not a feature request but actually a bug.
• Yes, I am using a monospace font. Sorry, my link was wrong, it should have leaded to fr.wikiversity (I’ve just fixed it). There’s a rule: .ve-init-mw-desktopArticleTarget .ve-ui-mwWikitextSurface .ve-ce-attachedRootNode { padding: 0 1.8em; } for the colored text. And e.g. here there’s a rule .skin-vector .ve-init-mw-desktopArticleTarget .CodeMirror { padding: 0 1.8em; } for the code editor, so things are OK. But here, the latter rule is not present, so it fallbacks to .ve-init-mw-desktopArticleTarget .CodeMirror { padding: 1.5em; }, which is different from the first rule and makes the text field shifted from the text display. I believe there’s a stylesheet structure problem. It might be quite specific to fr.wikiversity, but well, then you should probably inform the wikis or check for this yourself.

I also have another bug.

• Copy-pasting with middle click (on Linux) don’t work in the new editor (nor in the visual editor). I use this feature extensively… Currently on Firefox it pops a navigation tool (that thing which allows you to scroll the page by placing your mouse on the right side of it), and after the first click it does a copy-pasting but without moving the cursor, while usually this moves the cursor to the location on which you click. There’s much chance it’s already documented on Phabricator.

The inability to copy–paste with middle click on Linux looks like another CodeMirror problem: phab:T174635.

When they add the ability to insert a non-breaking space, they'll obviously have to start accepting them. That said, so long as enwiki tells people not to use 'invisible' non-breaking spaces, and therefore WikEd (a volunteer-supported editing environment preferred by some power users) keeps replacing them with the HTML code for non-breaking spaces, I wouldn't be surprised if the result was VisualEditor substituting the HTML code for non-breaking spaces rather than just leaving the actual non-breaking space in the wikitext (which is what I would personally prefer).

Adding no-break spaces through a special feature and through the ‘generic’ way (that works everywhere else on the system) is actually a different thing. You might be right, but I don’t think so; in any case, it’s not ‘obvious’. The editor is probably already able to edit pages that already contain no-break spaces, otherwise it would break things. If you add a way to add no-break spaces, it won’t certainly fix my bug.

Indeed   works in the wikitext editor, therefore I agree it’s not really an important feature to be able to insert no-break spaces with the wikitext editor. I didn’t even noticed that the Phabricator task you linked was about the VisualEditor… But   might be a too ugly syntax. Sometimes you might prefer to write no-break spaces directly in the code because it makes it more readable, and people should now that they have to write a no-break space at this place.

I’ll involve in the Phabricator task.

Thank you for your answer about the copy-pasting bug; indeed I’d already encountered it with CodeMirror.

VisualEditor is both "the visual editor" and "the new wikitext mode" (aka 2017 wikitext editor).

OK. Thanks.