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EditHelp

Automatic insertion of start-of-line wiki markups, brackets, keyboard shortcuts.

Description

Start-of-line markup auto-insertion

When a user writes wiki markup, a bulleted list is entered with the sign * before the line. When the user presses "Enter/Return", the script will examine the line and if it starts with *, it will automatically insert a * before the new line, similar to how office suites insert list items. This way the user needs to simply type the text of the new list item.

In a similar fashion, the following start-of-line markups are recognized and re-inserted automatically when the user presses "Enter":

• *, **, ***, ... unordered/bulleted list
• #, ##, ###, ... numbered list
• : : definition list
•   (space) preformatted text
• ->, -->, -<, --<, ... indented and hanging text
• || simple table row
• Additionally, it inserts the characters "-" (minus) and ">" (greater than, quote) on the new line if the current line starts with them.

Press Enter a second time to remove the auto-inserted markup (if there is nothing on the line).

The above automatic insertions are particularly useful on touch screen devices where it is more difficult to type punctuation.

Demo: the recipe is enabled on any page on pmwiki.org, you can test it for example in Main.WikiSandbox.

These edit help functions were first written for a "Structured sections editor" recipe in February 2016 (currently abandoned), but felt so natural and easy to use (a user described them as "exhilarating/addictive"), that I decided to port them to the regular PmWiki text editor. Enjoy!

Keyboard shortcuts

As of 2026-04-17 I recommend testing shortcuts with the pre-release, or here on pmwiki.org, as work is ongoing with fast changes.

Additionally, the following keyboard shortcuts might be appreciated by advanced editors with full keyboards:

[*] Here "..." means the cursor or the selected text.
[**] Cycle = Press multiple times until you reach the desired result. Press Ctrl+Z to cycle back to the previous insertion.

Eventually these will be configurable both per wiki and per-user.

Auto-Brackets

# enable start-of-line auto-insert, keyboard shortcuts
$EnableEditAutoText = 1;

# if NO text is selected, when typing opening bracket,
# insert opening and closing brackets around the cursor (optional):
$EditAutoBrackets['cursor'] = '"{[('; # insert "", {}, [], or ()

# if text IS selected, when typing opening bracket, wrap the
# selected text in the opening and closing brackets (optional):
$EditAutoBrackets['selection'] = '\'`~"{[(-+@^%_=<>';

If $EditAutoBrackets['cursor'] is enabled, typing an opening character automatically inserts the corresponding closing character after the cursor.

If $EditAutoBrackets['selection'] is enabled and text is selected, typing the opening character wraps the selection with the opening and closing characters.

The opening and closing characters are the same, except for these:

  ( inserts ()
  [ inserts []
  { inserts {}
  < inserts <> (useful for HTML)
  > inserts >< (useful for WikiStyles)

Eventually these will be configurable both per wiki and per-user.

Installation

For PmWiki 2.2.119 or newer, add to config.php:
$EnableEditAutoText = 1;

Since PmWiki 2.4.0, you can enable auto-brackets:
$EditAutoBrackets = array('('=>')', '['=>']', '{'=>'}', '"'=>'"');
Since PmWiki 2.5.9, auto-brackets definitions changed, see above.

Notes

• A recent browser with JavaScript enabled is needed for the recipe to work.
• The recipe is likely incompatible with CodeMirror or with any of the WYSIWYG attempts.
  • It does work with PmSyntax.
  • Should work with SectionEdit version 20230302 or newer.

Change log / Release notes

• 20191003 added to PmWiki 2.2.119. For subsequent updates please see ChangeLog.
• 20160317 First public release, ready to be tested.

See also

• PmSyntax (Syntax highlighting for the PmWiki documentation and edit form) is compatible with this recipe.
• The CodeMirror recipe also provides automatic insertion of list items, and more. Unfortunately, select-copy and middle-click-paste does not work with it so I cannot use it.
• Worse (is better) Simple WYSIWYG editing for PmWiki
• JsEditToolbar toolbar for the edit form with regex find & replace tools

Contributors

Recipe written and maintained by Petko.

Comments

See discussion at EditHelp-Talk