mvs, a Perl program available from CPAN.

This bypasses the need for a web browser. There are also command line tools that allow you to download articles, edit them using your favorite text editor, and upload the edited articles back into Wikipedia (or into any MediaWiki server). As of this writing, it is common for other external editor plugins (It's All Text, ViewSourceWith) to not support multi-process (aka e10s) Firefox, whereas withE圎ditor does.

withE圎ditor supports nonblocking editing in an external editor.

(You may see question marks in an edit textbox unrelated to the edits you are making (for example, the Unicodegrapheme and other glyphs at the bottom), but your edits won't destroy the characters.)

TextArea Sputnik, supports nonblocking editing and different encodings in an external editor.

ViewSourceWith provides similar functionality vis-a-vis the text editing.

However, the development version does not have these problems. The official package does not support editing UTF-8-encoded documents and does not install properly on Mozilla Firefox.

Vimperator and Pentadactyl have a shortcut in Insert mode that allows external text editing (the default is Ctrl+i).(See below for highlighting within Vim.) Note: Stopped working on Firefox 57+. Note: If you also want syntax highlighting in your edit box, this addon may be incompatible with the highlighting in Preferences → Beta features, but works with the highlighting in Preferences → Gadgets. It's All Text!, supports nonblocking editing and UTF-8 encoding.This then avoids the need to copy and paste the article text between browser and editor. If you are using the Mozilla web browser, it is possible to configure an external editor for editing text areas, including the Wikipedia edit area. Preview and check the edited page before saving it.Select the browser text area contents so that they are overwritten, then paste the edited text back.Perform the editing and copy the text editor contents.Select the entire content of the browser text area (as with Ctrl+ A or ⌘ Cmd+ A), copy it (to the clipboard Ctrl+ C), then paste ( Ctrl+ V) it into an external editor window.

Open the Wikipedia edit window for the article or section as normally in browser (click the Edit tab of a page or section, or use the keyboard shortcut ⇧ Shift+ Alt+ E).A word processor may also be used, and may be less likely to mishandle special characters. Check in a preview that your editor has not mangled any special characters before saving the edited page. Some text editors do not support, or may not be set up to support, various special characters-Chinese characters, non-Latin letters, mathematical symbols, and so on-they are typically replaced with a character that renders as a square. A 'manual' way of editing in an external GUI text editor is to use copy and paste.

Mac plain text editor