vim-mediawiki: vim plugin to edit MediaWiki pages

This is a plugin to help editing pages of a MediaWiki site from vim/neovim. It provides:

• filetype detection
• improved syntax highlighting
• page preview
• semantic auto-completion of links and templates with a coc.nvim source
• UltiSnips snippets
• <plug> mappings for text objects
• matching pairs for matchit.vim
• integration with vim-surround

Installation

The plugin can be installed with any package manager. Prerequisites are vim 8.1+ or neovim 0.4+, a working Python3 installation, and the mwclient Python package (pip install mwclient).

Auto-completion

If coc.nvim is installed and configured properly, the completion source should work out-of-the-box for buffers of type mediawiki. Completion is triggered when typing inside double square brackets or double braces, and the minimum number of characters to type before completion can be configured. Multi-word completion is supported, so completions will be suggested when typing more than one word inside the brackets, together with a hint of the full page name.

When inserting a template, semantic completion of parameter names is provided, and the documentation for each parameter is provided in the floating window, based on the TemplateData API.

You can refer to the relevant upstream documentation to configure the source in coc.nvim. Settings can be defined in the coc-settings.json:

{
    "coc": {
        "source": {
            "mediawiki": {
                "enable": true,
                "priority": 99
            }
        }
    }
}

To further configure completion, see the following section.

If you do not use coc.nvim, you may be able to use the function coc#source#mediawiki#complete() to implement an omnifunc, or to write an adapter to plug it in other completion mechanisms. Please refer to the upstream documentation of the API used by this source.

Snippets

Snippets in the UltiSnips format are shipped with this plugin, and they should work out-of-the-box if UltiSnips is installed and configured. UltiSnips snippets can be used in coc.nvim through the coc-ultisnips source.

Please note that this plugin aims to be site-agnostic, therefore no snippets are shipped for specific sites, e.g. common templates used on the English Wikipedia. Snippets of such kind are out of the scope of this project, but can be easily defined in your own configuration, please refer to the upstream documentation for more information.

Text objects

The plugin provides a set of text objects:

• <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-inside-tick) and <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-around-tick) to operate inside or around italic and bold markers
• <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-inside-heading) and <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-around-heading) to operate inside or around headings
• <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-inside-pipes) and <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-around-pipes) to operate inside or around pipes (e.g. positional template arguments)
• <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-inside-link-page) and <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-around-link-page) to operate inside or around the leftmost part of a link (between [[ and |), containing the page of a link
• <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-inside-link-name) and <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-around-link-name) to operate inside or around the rightmost part of a link (between | and ]]), containing the name of a link
• <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-inside-template-begin) and <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-around-template-begin) to operate inside or around the leftmost part of a template (between {{ and |)
• <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-inside-template-end) and <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-around-template-end) to operate inside or around the rightmost part of a template (between | and }})
• <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-inside-named-argument) and <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-around-named-argument) to operate inside or around a named argument (between = and |, where | is always excluded from the text object)

The <plug> mappings can be associated to key mappings, for instance:

vmap <silent> <buffer> i' <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-inside-tick)
vmap <silent> <buffer> a' <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-around-tick)
omap <silent> <buffer> i' <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-inside-tick)
omap <silent> <buffer> a' <plug>(mediawiki-text-object-around-tick)

Surround

If vim-surround is installed, mappings are created to surround text with wiki-link or template double-brackets, or with bold or italic ticks. The characters bound to the surround map can be configured with the variables

let g:vim_mediawiki_surround_wikilink = 'l'
let g:vim_mediawiki_surround_template = 't'
let g:vim_mediawiki_surround_bold = 'b'
let g:vim_mediawiki_surround_italic = 'i'

and can be disabled by setting

let g:vim_mediawiki_surround = 0

Configuration

A set of variables allows to customise the behaviour of the plugin. All variables can either be set globally as g:vim_mediawiki_... or locally for each buffer with b:vim_mediawiki_....

Site

The value of g:vim_mediawiki_site sets the address of the wiki to edit. The default is an empty string, and you need to set this in order to use features such as auto-completion. Example:

let g:vim_mediawiki_site = 'en.wikipedia.org'

Site-specific options are stored in dictionaries, allowing to map different settings to different sites for each buffer, according to the value of b:vim_mediawiki_site. It is possible to automatically map custom file extensions to site-specific settings by creating a custom ftdetect/mediawiki.vim. For instance, to map files with extension *.enwiki to settings specific for the English language Wikipedia:

autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.enwiki
\   set filetype=mediawiki |
\   let b:vim_mediawiki_site = 'en.wikipedia.org' |
\   set spelllang=en

Completion

It is possible to customise which namespaces to auto-complete. The configuration is stored on a per-site basis in a dictionary called g:vim_mediawiki_completion_namespaces, whose keys are possible values of g:vim_mediawiki_site. Each site is mapped to a dictionary, that associates each trigger sequence to the number of the corresponding namespace on that site. Example:

let g:vim_mediawiki_completion_namespaces = {
\   'en.wikipedia.org': {
\       '[[': 0,
\       '{{': 10,
\   },
\   'sv.wikipedia.org': {
\       '[[': 0,
\       '[[File:': 6,
\       '[[Kategori:': 14,
\   },
\ }

Only the namespaces listed in this map will be completed. A default entry is used for sites not present among the keys. The pre-defined configuration is

let g:vim_mediawiki_completion_namespaces = {
\   'default': {
\       '[[': 0,
\   },
\ }

and the custom configuration is merged with it, so the default key is present unless it is overridden. Moreover, the buffer-local configuration is merged with the global configuration, so it is not necessary to duplicate the whole configuration in buffer-local variables, but it is sufficient to add or overwrite only the desired sites. To disable completion for a site, map it to an empty dictionary.

A complete configuration to edit the English language Wikipedia would be:

let g:vim_mediawiki_completion_namespaces = {
\   'en.wikipedia.org': {
\       '[[': 0,
\       '[[Talk:': 1,
\       '[[User:': 2,
\       '[[User talk:': 3,
\       '[[Wikipedia:': 4,
\       '[[Wikipedia talk:': 5,
\       '[[File:': 6,
\       '[[:File:': 6,
\       '[[File talk:': 7,
\       '[[MediaWiki:': 8,
\       '[[MediaWiki talk:': 9,
\       '[[Template:': 10,
\       '{{': 10,
\       '[[Template talk:': 11,
\       '[[Help:': 12,
\       '[[Help talk:': 13,
\       '[[Category:': 14,
\       '[[:Category:': 14,
\       '[[Category talk:': 15,
\       '[[Portal:': 100,
\       '[[Portal talk:': 101,
\       '[[Book:': 108,
\       '[[Book talk:': 109,
\       '[[Draft:': 118,
\       '[[Draft talk:': 119,
\       '[[TimedText:': 710,
\       '[[TimedText talk:': 711,
\       '[[Module:': 828,
\       '[[Module talk:': 829,
\   },
\ }

The value of g:vim_mediawiki_completion_prefix_length determines the minimum number of characters required after the trigger sequence to trigger completion. Default:

let g:vim_mediawiki_completion_prefix_length = 5

The value of g:vim_mediawiki_completion_limit determines how many suggestions are fetched. Default:

let g:vim_mediawiki_completion_limit = 15

Preview

The command MediaWikiPreview generates a preview of the page being edited, and loads it in a web browser window. It is possible to customise the command used to open the browser, by setting

let g:vim_mediawiki_browser_command = "chromium \r"

where the carriage return character \r will be replaced with the address of the page to open (attention should be paid to insert an actual carriage return character, and to not escape the backslash).

Mappings

No mappings are set out-of-the-box. The following optional navigation mappings

noremap <buffer> j gj
noremap <buffer> k gk
noremap <buffer> 0 g0
noremap <buffer> ^ g^
noremap <buffer> $ g$
nnoremap <buffer> D dg$
nnoremap <buffer> C cg$
nnoremap <buffer> A g$a

that help navigating wrapped lines can be enabled by setting to true the variable

let g:vim_mediawiki_mappings = 1

Syntax highlighting

Languages within <source> or <syntaxhighlight> tags will be highlighted. A list of languages (identified by their wiki name) to be ignored can be set:

let g:vim_mediawiki_ignored_wikilangs = ['cobol', 'pascal']

Syntax highlight settings are loaded for the languages detected within the buffer at load or save time. Language settings can be preloaded for selected languages:

let g:vim_mediawiki_preloaded_wikilangs = ['c', 'python']

A language name can be remapped to a different vim syntax highlighting:

let g:vim_mediawiki_wikilang_map = {'c': 'cpp'}

Credits and license

The syntax/mediawiki.vim file is based on code originally published on Wikipedia:Text editor support as public domain, and distributed within the plugins wikipedia.vim and mediawiki.vim.

The ftplugin/mediawiki.vim file contains some portions of code from the HTML ftplugin of the vim runtime, by Johannes Zellner and Benji Fisher, and from mediawiki.vim by Jean-Denis Vauguet (a.k.a. chikamichi).

The autoload/mediawiki/fenced_languages.vim file is adapted from mediawiki.vim by Olivier Teulière (a.k.a. ipkiss42).

All the original parts of this software, where not differently attributed or licensed, are distributed under the MIT license. The full text of the license is available in the LICENSE file distributed alongside the source code.