Wikipedia:Wikipedia-mode.el
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This article describes the installation of wikipedia-mode, an Emacs major mode for editing Wikipedia articles offline, and of the auxiliary mode longlines-mode. These tweak Emacs's behavior in several ways to make it easier to edit Wikipedia articles. In particular, wikipedia-mode provides syntax highlighting for Wikipedia markup.
For other methods of using Emacs with Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Text editor support.
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[edit] Installing wikipedia-mode
To install wikipedia-mode, save wikipedia-mode.el ([1]) to a convenient directory, preferably one in your Emacs load-path. (To see which directories are in your load-path, type C-h v load-path while in Emacs.)
Next, open your Emacs initialization file. (This is usually a file called .emacs in your home directory; to find out what it is, type C-h v user-init-file. If this is a new Windows Emacs installation, you need to choose a home directory. See Where do I put my .emacs file?) Add the following lines:
(autoload 'wikipedia-mode "wikipedia-mode.el" "Major mode for editing documents in Wikipedia markup." t)
If you did not save wikipedia-mode.el in a `load-path' directory, replace "wikipedia-mode.el" with the full pathname. On Windows, remember to use forward slashes ("/") rather than back slashes ("\") to indicate the directory. For example,
(autoload 'wikipedia-mode "C:/Documents and Settings/USERNAME/.emacs.d/Wikipedia-mode.el" "Major mode for editing documents in Wikipedia markup." t)
It is often convenient to associate wikipedia-mode with certain filenames, so that Emacs will enter wikipedia-mode automatically whenever such files are opened. In order to associate filenames ending in ".wiki" with wikipedia-mode, add the following to your initialization file:
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist
'("\\.wiki\\'" . wikipedia-mode))
To use this mode automatically with the Firefox extensions ViewSource, add:
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist
'("en\\.wikipedia\\.org" . wikipedia-mode))
Still further customizations can be added; suppose one wants Emacs to spellcheck files opened up in wikipedia-mode using the FlySpell program? One could add some elisp like this:
(setq text-mode-hook (quote (#[nil "\300\301!\207" [flyspell-mode 1] 2] flyspell-buffer text-mode-hook-identify)))
[edit] Installing longlines-mode
Wikipedia articles don't use line breaks, which means that paragraphs are not separated into lines by return characters. By default, Emacs sees such documents as a bunch of super-long lines. There are several solutions to this problem: you can use toggle-truncate-lines to fold long lines on the screen (if they are truncated) or you can use longlines-mode to "word wrap" text using "soft" newlines.
If you decide to use the first approach you are likely need to download a third-party package—screen-lines.el—which redefines movement commands to work in terms of screen lines, as opposed to text lines (that is if you use next-line it moves cursor vertically down to the next line on the screen, whereas traditionally it moves cursor to the next text line).
The second approach requires longlines-mode which is included in recent versions of Emacs. If your version does not include it you need to do the following:
Download longlines.el to your load-path and add these lines to your Emacs initialization file (typically .emacs or .emacs.el):
(autoload 'longlines-mode "longlines.el" "Minor mode for editing long lines." t)
[edit] Usage
You can enter wikipedia-mode at any time by typing M-x wikipedia-mode. While in wikipedia-mode, you can view a description of the mode by typing C-h m, which runs the command describe-mode.
There are two ways to use wikipedia-mode. The first is to copy articles between Emacs and your web browser's text box. The second way to use wikipedia-mode is with the MozEx plugin for the Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox web browsers, which allows you to call Emacs for editing text boxes, or the more recent and still-supported ViewSource plugin for Firefox, which provides similar functionality vis-a-vis the text editing.
If you mostly edit Wikipedia articles using the MozEx plugin, it might be worthwhile to associate MozEx editing sessions with wikipedia-mode. This is done in a similar way:
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("mozex.\\.*" . wikipedia-mode))
Another Firefox plugin that may be used with wikipedia-mode is ViewSourceWith. To associate its files with Emacs add this line:
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("index.\\.*" . wikipedia-mode))
[edit] Licensing
The packages wikipedia-mode.el and longlines.el are released under the GNU General Public License.
[edit] External links
- Emacs wiki page- with downloadable .elisp file
- Another host of the .el file
