editmoin

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. News
  3. Usage
  4. Change settings
  5. Selecting your editor
  6. Setting your username
  7. Setting your moin IDs explicitly
  8. Aliases
  9. Shortcuts
  10. Proxies
  11. Backups
  12. Vim syntax highlighting
  13. Tested versions
  14. Disclaimer
  15. Bug tracking
  16. License
  17. Download
  18. Author

Introduction

That's the editmoin web page. This program allows you to edit Moin pages with your preferred editor. It means you can easily edit your pages, without the usual limitations of most web browsers' text areas.

News

Usage

Its usage is simple and straightforward. Just provide moin's web page url as the first parameter. For example: 

editmoin http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/TestPage

You can also use the -t parameter, to inform a template to base this page on. For example: 

editmoin -t SomeTemplate http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/TestPage

Change settings

While you're editing a page you'll notice that a few settings are available at the top of the page. These settings are preceded by a @ symbol, and are immediately followed by the page body. These settings allow you to inform, for example, if you want subscribing users to be notified of your changes, or provide a comment for your change. Their functionality is simple, and their meaning, format, and usage should be obvious to you.

Selecting your editor

The default editor is vi. If you want to use any other, just set the EDITOR environment variable accordingly.

{i} Hint: to use gvim as your editor, make sure you use the -f flag.

Setting your username

For editmoin to be able to authenticate you against the moin site you're accessing, it must know your username. For that, you must edit the file ~/.moin_ids and insert URL USERNAME pairs in it. For example: 

http://moinmo.in YourUserName
http://wiki.ubuntu.com
http://example.com/moin/moin.cgi AnotherUserName

If the server needs Basic HTTP Authentication you can use something like: 

https://username:password@example.com/moin/moin.cgi YourUserName

For using shortcuts (see below), and also for better control, defining URLs without IDs in that file is valid.

Setting your moin IDs explicitly

In remote times, authentication was done in moin using an ID, consisting mostly of numbers. Nowadays moin was improved to work with a more traditional username/password scheme. Even then, if the traditional username scheme mentioned above doesn't work for you, IDs may still be obtained after authentication, when the moin site sends your browser a MOIN_ID or MOIN_SESSION cookie.

Setting moin IDs consists of changing a file named ~/.moin_ids and inserting URL ID pairs in it. For example: 

http://moinmo.in 987654321.321.54321 
http://wiki.canonical.com
http://example.com/moin/moin.cgi 123456789.123.12345

If the server needs Basic HTTP Authentication you can use something like: 

https://username:password@example.com/moin/moin.cgi 123456789.123.12345

For using shortcuts (see below), and also for better control, defining URLs without usernames in that file is valid.

Aliases

Besides using shortcuts, it's also possible to define URL aliases in a file named ~/.moin_aliases. This file should contain lines with pairs of alias translation. For instance: 

script http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/ScriptMarket

With this line present, one may execute a command like follows: 

editmoin script/EditMoin

and get the expected result.

Notice that unlike shortcuts, aliases must match exactly to be considered. After the alias is translated, the resulting URL is also processed for matching shortcuts as specified below.

Shortcuts

Instead of using the whole URL, you may use a shortcut, which consists of any substring of an URL contained in ~/.moin_users and/or ~/.moin_ids, followed by a slash and an optional subpath. For instance: 

editmoin canonical/FrontPage

Proxies

If you're behind a proxy, set the http_proxy environment variable, as usual.

Backups

Editing a moin page may take several minutes, or even hours sometimes. With this in mind, after you change some page it is saved in a file named ~/.moin_lastedit even before trying to commit it. This gives an extra protection against casual problems. Note that this file is overwritten every time a page is successfuly changed, so save it somewhere if you want to keep it.

Vim syntax highlighting

If you're a happy Vim user, you may want to use the files moin1_5.vim and moin1_6.vim, which are syntax highlighting files for Moin structured text format. There are two different files because the syntax has changed in an incompatible way in version 1.6 of Moin.

To enable syntax highlighting, put these files in a directory named ~/.vim/syntax/, and insert something similar to the following in your ~/.vimrc: 

au! BufRead,BufNewFile *.moin
    \ if getline(1) =~ '^@@ Syntax: 1\.5$' | setf moin1_5
    \ | else | setf moin1_6 | endif

A sligthly more complex version, contributed by Piotr Meyer, allows highlighting reStructuredText and MarkDown as well: 

au! BufRead,BufNewFile *.moin
   \ let l=search("^$", 'n')
   \ | if search('^#format rst$', 'n', l) > 0 | setf rst
   \ | elseif search('^#format text_markdown$', 'n', l) > 0 | setf mkd
   \ | elseif getline(1) =~ '^@@ Syntax: 1\.5$' | setf moin1_5
   \ | else | setf moin1_6
   \ | endif

You can also choose to set the filetype explicitely in your moin file, by using a comment like the following at the bottom: 

## vim:ft=moin1_6

Tested versions

This program was tested with the moin versions below. If it breaks or works with some other version, please let me know.

Disclaimer

This program expects information to be in a very specific format. It will break if this format changes, so there are no warranties at all. All I can say is that it worked for me, at least once. ;)

Bug tracking

Bug tracking is done in Launchpad:

License

editmoin is available under the GPL.

Download

Author

GustavoNiemeyer <gustavo@niemeyer.net>

editmoin (last edited 2011-04-11 16:52:45 by GustavoNiemeyer)