Wikipedia:MozEx tutorial

This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference.
Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. MozEx is no longer available, or compatible with recent versions of Firefox. See Wikipedia:Text editor support for alternatives.

This tutorial describes how to use the MozEx extension of Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox to edit Wikipedia pages in your editor of choice.

Installing MozEx

First, you must download and install the MozEx extension by visiting the appropriate web page and following the installation link provided there. The stable version of the MozEx package (at http://mozex.mozdev.org/) does not support editing UTF-8-encoded documents (and has a broken download link 2011-04-28 (visit directly download Index of mozex http://downloads.mozdev.org/mozex/), so the next best option is to visit http://nic-nac-project.de/~kaosmos/mozex107-en.html to download a modified version, mozex-1.07.6). This is particularly problematic since all Wikipedia articles are encoded in UTF-8 by default. However, the developer's version of MozEx does support UTF-8.

Configuring MozEx

After installing MozEx, depending on your operating system and its settings, you may need to configure MozEx to invoke the text editor of your choice. Detailed instructions for this are available on the official MozEx web page.

Note for Microsoft Windows users

When configuring the textarea setting to open up the text editor of your choice, the path must be wrapped inside quotation marks if long filenames are present.

For example: "C:\Program Files\PSPad editor\PSPad.exe" %t

Without quotes, MS-DOS 8.3 filenames must be used instead: C:\PROGRA~1\editor\edit.exe %t

You can display the short filenames by entering at the command prompt: dir /x

Note for Vim users

When configuring the textarea setting for use with Vim, be sure and use the -f commandline parameter. For example:

C:\PROGRA~1\Vim\vim71\gvim.exe -f %t
/usr/local/bin/gvim -f %t

Editing with MozEx

To edit a Wikipedia page, click on the "edit this page" link. A box (textarea) containing editable text will show up. Right-click with the mouse in the textarea, and select mozex→Edit Textarea from the context menu that pops up. Your favorite editor will pop up, and you will be able to edit the text. Once you are done, save the text, go back to the browser window, and click on the text area. The text will be automatically updated, and the file you just saved will be deleted from your computer.