Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Editing/Tool for easy user buttons

Tool for easy user buttons

  • Problem: Users can make their own buttons for better editing, which insert to edit area some templates, parts of code or patterns.

    This can be done by editing user javascript page. But majority of users is not skilled enough to make these buttons, only some of them copy it from other users, but when some problem occurs, they are not able to repair it.

  • Who would benefit: Editors
  • Proposed solution: Make some extension, where every user can easily make his own buttons.
    Tool can be based on User:Krinkle/Scripts/InsertWikiEditorButton.js. There will be table in the special:preferences
active name text before cursor text after cursor picture tooltip
X coord {{Coord|lat |lon|}}   Coordinates
X hello Hello world   insert hello world
O speedy {{Delete}}   nominates for deletion
X char ʘ   some weird character

Discussion

  • @JAn Dudík: The #5 wish of the 2017 Wishlist was the Template Wizard. Are all the insertions that you're thinking of with these custom buttons related to inserting templates? If so, does the template wizard suffice? I guess the big difference is that the user has to know what the template is called because they need to search for it in the wizard, but the other functionality seems to be there, along with a good interface for inserting particular parameters etc. —Sam Wilson 10:00, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • It is probably not the same. My proposal is about buttons, which can insert any string, either{{Template foo|with parameters}} as lorem ipsum or . Somebody uses it for inserting single characters (eg. some ligatures in wikisource, ipa chars on wiktionary etc.), somebody for article skeleton, somebody for template. JAn Dudík (talk) 13:50, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, I wanted to come up with a similar proposal. This would be really useful. Another point is that the bad code is often copied over many JS pages making these codes inefficient. — Draceane talkcontrib. 17:36, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • This proposal reminds me of an older feature request to allow the definition of a number of scrap-macros in preferences by inserting user-definable keywords (like @mymacro1@) into the wiki markup which would be expanded according to their definition by the frontend when pressing "save". For users of visual frontends, such keywords could be dropped into the source by buttons or hotkeys, so it would work regardless of the way a user edits a page. (See [[1]]) Is this about what you want to accomplish as well? --Matthiaspaul (talk) 19:36, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Not exactly. if I write @coord@, I am not able to add parameters. And there is no difference between @coord@ and {{subst:User/mytemplate}}. With button I can easily insert to text empty template {{Coord||}} and only add values.
    Big pain of modern UI in many programs is ribbon menu, where are groups of tools and only one of them is active. But when I want use one or two tools in every group, i must permanently switch. In current wikitext editor is <nowiki> in one submenu, character t͡s in second and cite tools in third. ANd some more useful things are under textarea. But my user buttons are in the top, accesible from all submenus. JAn Dudík (talk) 20:54, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Voting