How can I edit wiki pages in an external editor?

[skip_montanaro]

I have never liked through-the-web editing of HTML content, in part because I've been using Emacs for 30+ years and its behavior is burned into my brain. (Not just a few keybindings either.)

I thought, "No problem." I'll just grab the <tagged> source from the edit window, run tidy over it to make it look, well, tidy, then have at it in Emacs. That didn't work so well. Tidy doesn't like that content. It doesn't appear to be complete (macro tags like <ac:structured-macro> are unknown), so it refuses to mess with it. It's unlikely that editing a copy of the actual page source will work either.

For now, I can make do with manually reflowing <p> and <li> tags. Is there some reasonable way to edit page content using an external editor?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

An external editor would have to fully understand the xhtml that Confluence uses.  I've never seen any editor make that claim (as it would have to replicate the editor in Confluence, and why bother when you've got Confluence).  No-one has even written an extension for Emacs to understand it.

A more simple option is to use basic text, paste it or upload with REST and then do the Confluence formatting when you are in front of the editor.

[skip_montanaro]

It isn't so much about replicating the editor, it's just that every through-the-web editor I've ever used has felt deficient. Searching sucks. Find and replace sucks. Then there is the key binding thing. Most key binding extensions are themselves sadly lacking. The authors figure, "Oh, if we make the arrow keys work, that should be enough." Bollocks. That doesn't make it Emacs (or vi). Mature editors don't lose unsaved work (and give you trivial ways to save your work on-the-fly).

I would be happy if the <> view in the editor displayed obviously text markup wrapped at a reasonable spot. Just wrapping <p> and <li> tags to something sane, like 76 columns, would be a big step forward. 90% of the time, all I want to do is just edit the content. I can tweak the presentation through the web. On those rare occasions where I want to fiddle with HTML tags, it's almost certainly going to involve something simple, like <p> or <li>, which Emacs' SGML mode (and similar modes in other editors) should handle just fine.