Short description
To improve accessibility it would be nice if Moin has - besides the built-in text-editor and gui-editor - also a built-in text-editor which does some syntax highlighting of the wiki markup entered. At the moment, syntax highlighting is only possible one the clientside (see e.g. VimHighlighting). It would be nice if this could move to the serverside so that all users - regardless which device they use - can profit of syntax highlighting.
Discussion
To achieve syntax highlighting on the serverside, the same technology like the gui-editor has to be used, see http://www.i3g.hs-heilbronn.de/attach/Ver%C3%B6ffentlichungen/What+you+see+is+Wiki.pdf (working paper) and http://www.jspwiki.org/wiki/WikiWizard (demo, screenshots and video). I don't like the suggested combination there of wysiwyg and highlighted markup. I would prefer to have only highlighted markup. Maybe some parts of the FCK-editor can be reused for this. Since I don't expect the people of FCK to turn their editor into a syntax-highlighting text-editor (http://dev.fckeditor.net/ticket/128), I lance the feature request here on Moin.
Available editors with syntax highlighting
http://www.cdolivet.net/editarea/ realtime syntax highlighting, text search and replace functionality
http://codepress.org/ (current release v.0.9.5; status: quite mature; already adopted by typo3, wordpress, drupal)
- pros
- real-time syntax highlighting
- code snippets: write e.g. "if", press [tab] and get if() {...} (interesting for Moin?)
auto completion: simple type " or ' or ( or [ or { { { and get " " ' ' () [[]] { { { } } }. This would be very nice to speed up input like heading stuff ==kk==or formatting stuff ''asfd''
shortcuts: e.g. press [ctrl][shift][space] to get text (have a shortcut for attachment??)
easily extensible for other markup languages if a wikipage uses e.g. #format dokuwiki
- quite mature; ready for implementation in Moin
- cons
- uses iframes; validation for html4.01 strict will fail therefore
Annotation: Most troubles when I tried to do a first implementation of codepress in Moin might be solved by some given workarounds on http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=654507 (like dash in textarea id "editor-textarea", resizing textarea on window resize, failure on sending codepress textarea content back to Moin); codepress currently does not support Opera
- pros
http://helene.muze.nl/ (current release v.0.5; status: immature)
Related links