Topic on Talk:Talk pages project/Replying/Flow

I have really adopted this functionality, and use it constantly.

I miss one thing:

Very often I want to copy text from previous comments, to quote, but mostly to copy the wikitext; url:s and wikilinks for clarifcation (rather than saying "look above, it is somewhere in previous links" implying "you lazy S*B") and usernames (for pinging).

Now when you copy it becomes plain text.

• So, when hitting answer, if text marked and copied around the "answer-dialogue-box" would be wikiformated in the same way as it was when pasted into the answer dialogue, is missed.

I hope it is understandable what i miss, and I understand it is a lot to ask for. But does such a function make sense to anyone but me? To me it affects more than half of my answers, maybe more, mostly due to pinging where I cant use copy-paste.

LittleGun, I think you're saying you'd like to copy formatted text and have it transfer still formatted? I suspect that would fight with another feature in Visual, which is to allow you to type formatted text and have it appear as typed, such as when you want to teach a newbie how to create a ping. In Visual, if you insert or type an existing page, it should offer to format as a wikilink for you. I haven't tried with a URL.

Maybe if Source allowed you to copy formatted text and when you pasted, it would reformat? Is that what you're looking for?

Yes, i want it to work as when copying text from visual editor editing: if I paste to a wikitext window it becomes wikicode. If I paste to a visual editor window it becomes formatted text. I want copied text to keep its formatting. Now it becomes plain text.

I tried the copying and pasting into the visual mode, and some basic formatting like links and bullet points are kept. (Other things like headings and images are lost, though.) Maybe it depends on the browser/operating system; I have Firefox 78 on Debian GNU/Linux 10 “buster”.

OK, thank you. What I am after is the links; for pinging, to refer and to quote. If possible. (I am using Chrome on a Chromebook, mainly)

As I wrote, copying and pasting links works for me right now. Do you have issues? Now I tried in Chromium as well, and it also works for me. (Chromium is Google Chrome’s completely open-source version, with hardly any difference between Chrome and Chromium, so if it doesn’t work for you, it’s more likely to be caused by the difference between Chrome OS and the Cinnamon desktop environment I use on Debian than the one between Chrome and Chromium.)

Yes, in a section-edit you can copy source from higher up in the edit box, but in Reply mode, the previous comments are HTML, so handling that formatting is useful. LittleGun, are you thinking of the “NWE” / “2017 wikitext editor”, where you can paste formatted text and it will ask do you want to convert to wikitext? There’s a prototype toolbar for Source mode which uses the 2017/NWE editor and offers that conversion. Paste formatted should already work in Visual mode.