Emacs for MediaWiki

Tyler Romeo wrote:

If I had the time, I would definitely put together some sort of .dir-locals.el for MediaWiki, that way we could make better use of Emacs, since it has a bunch of IDE-like functionality, even if it’s not IDEA-level powerful.

A client wanted to me to help train someone to take over the work for maintaining their MediaWiki installation. As part of that work, they asked for an IDE and, knowing that other MW devs used PHPStorm, I recommended it and they bought a copy for me and the person I was to train.

PHPStorm has “emacs keybindings” but these are just replacements for the CUA keybindings. Somethings that I expected the keybindings to invoke, didn’t. (It’s been a while since I’ve used PHPStorm, so I’ve forgotten the details.)

In any case, I’ve found that a lot of what I wanted from PHPStorm could be implemented in Emacs using the following .dir-locals.el (which I put above my core and extensions checkouts):

((nil . ((flycheck-phpcs-standard .
        "…/mediawiki/codesniffer/MediaWiki")
     (flycheck-phpmd-rulesets .
        ("…/mediawiki/messdetector/phpmd-ruleset.xml"))
     (mode . flycheck)
     (magit-gerrit-ssh-creds . "[email protected]"))))

The above is in addition to the code-sniffing I already had set up to put Emacs’ php-mode into the MW style.

The one thing that PHPStorm lacked (and where Emacs’ magit excels) is dealing with git submodules. Since I make extensive use of submodules for my MediaWiki work, this set up makes Emacs a much better tool for working with MediaWiki.

Naturally, I won’t claim that what works for me will work for anyone else. I’ve spent 15 years in Emacs every day. I was first exposed to Emacs in the late 80s(!!) so the virus has had a long time to work its way into my psyche and, by now, I’m incurable.