External interfaces - let's compare

See also Comparison of web browsers.

Please describe the programs (browsers, browser extensions, other programs, etc.) that you make use to navigate around and work on Wikipedia. Feel free to ask questions of any participant below about their interfaces. Immediately following this section, we continue with a comparison of our internal interfaces.

Tutorials
Help:Tutorial (main introduction and tutorial) Contributing to Wikipedia Introduction to referencing Introduction to uploading images Introduction to navigating Wikipedia Fundamentals of editing Learning the ropes A Primer for newcomers
User guides to ...
Scartol, on template use and design Dweller, on Featured Article Candidates Yuser, on fighting linkspam Deletion and deletionism Reporting and dealing with vandals Grutness's guide to stubbing
In the wp:Signpost
Summary of policies How to use an ImageMap Getting an article to featured article status Basic dispute resolution Adding citations
The published book, online
The Missing Manual
Help contents
Help menu Help directory

For example, I use Windows XP, and usually have 9 windows open for Wikipedia purposes alone (with a dozen other windows open for other purposes). Firefox takes up 6 of those windows, usually with several tabs open in each. A macro program in another window. Wordpad in another for data massage, and to provide an environment in which to use the macros (they work directly in the browser's edit window too, but much faster in wordpad). And Internet Explorer/AutoWikiBrowser in another (though I haven't used the being logged-in on two accounts at the same time trick, recently).

• To make macros, you need a macro program. I use Macro Express. You can download it from most major download websites, and use it for 30 days free. I swear by it. It's pretty inexpensive, but there's a free macro program called AutoHotkey.
• Alternately, you could learn how to write java or perl scripts.

I used to only have 13 bookmarks on my toolbar. But as I've memorized all of those, I've found I could shorten their names to almost nothing to make room on the bar for more book marks. Now I have 30 up there, with half of them devoted to Wikipedia links or tools (which include the Wikr bookmarklet, which comes in very handy for Wikipedia lookups when you are browsing the rest of the Internet. Just highlight a word or phrase in the text of page you are on, click on wikr, and it automatical searches for and jumps to Wikipedia's page about the term you highlighted. It of course also works from within Wikipedia. One very fast way to add bookmarks to your toolbar is to hover your mouse over a link, press and hold down the left mouse button, and drag the link up to the toolbar and let go. Instant bookmark. Delete and create more each session to accommodate the pages you need to return to the most.

I use the Firefox extension "Session Manager" which automatically remembers what was opened in each window and each tab, so that if I turn off the machine purposely or accidentally, and most importantly when Firefox crashes, when I log back in all my Firefox windows are restored to their last location/contents. The new version of Firefox has this feature built-in, but you may want to wait, because that version of Firefox is still a bit buggy. Windows XP does the same for my other windows.

I've just started using the Firefox extension called Linky, and it's pretty powerful. It's a tab and window autocreator, and provides a great deal of navigation control over links and pages. Awesome little tool. Now you don't have to remember where the links are you want to navigate, just open them all in tabs and read them at your leisure. While middle-click already allows you to this one link at a time, Linky grabs all the links on the page in one easy operaton. With or without Linky, press ^F (Ctrl-F4) to remove a tab you are done with, and the next tab is intantly shown on the screen. Saves time waiting for page loads from the server. It also works specifically on images and/or image links too, but I haven't tried that out yet.

Of the six windows in Firefox, 4 are set on Wikipedia (User pages in one, project pages in another, main namespace browsing in another, and one for miscellaneous), the 5th is reserved for Google site-specific searching of Wikipedia, and the 6th always has interiots external edit counter in it (I started using this extensively when I started coaching).

And that's just the external interface. But it's a starting point. Okay, your turns...   The Transhumanist   13:49, 4 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• I just use Windows XP and Microsoft Internet Explorer. -AMK152 14:57, 4 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

• I also use AutoWikiBrowser. I have downloaded VandalProof but don't use it. -AMK152 17:10, 4 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I use XP & IE6 and/or Firefox at work and at home, and also use Safari and Firefox under Mac OS X Leopard at home. I've got pop-ups going, but as I've said before, it kills Safari pretty regularly. I'm also just getting into VandalProof which is a great tool, but seems very buggy at the moment. I've used the Interiot edit counter several times and link to it from my User page. I'm just about to check out AWB to see if it makes life easier as well. As for browser configurations, I'll typically have three or four IE's open, one on my watchlist (although I'm using this less now with VP), one on RC patrol and when I'm stub-sorting I'll have a couple pointing at the list of categories and stub types. That's about it! Budgiekiller 16:53, 4 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oh yes, AWB is a power tool. You can feed task lists (in the form of lists of page links that you need to work on) into it, and it automatically loads the next page on the list when you save the one your in. It also does search/replacing. And once you've mastered it, consider applying for a bot account, because AWB has an automatic mode in which it performs as a bot. When combined with a macro program, it is already a defacto bot, but if you ever use it that way, you should have a bot account (bot edits are hidden from recent changes, to avoid obscurring in-person edits) -- and you have to watch it extremely closely when macro-controlled, with your finger ready and your mouse hovering over the kill button. As a rule of thumb, you should never leave any bot unattended, because if something goes wrong, it could go really wrong, especially if you have several thousand pages in its task queue. Walking away from the computer when a bot is running on Wikipedia not a good idea.

The user to watch as an example of bot expertise is Bluemoose and his bot account.

By the way, have you ever wondered how Steve Jobs got his position at Apple back? I mean, what leverage did he have? What he had was the NEXT operating system, and its development team. It became OS X. (I'm sure there's more to it than that). And I've heard that they've switched over to the intel chips, a move which looks like they are getting ready to make their OS available for use on PCs. Is OS X PC-compatible yet? If it ever is, let me know, 'cuz I want it.  The Transhumanist   08:13, 10 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've heard that quite a few people have gotten OS X running on regular non-Apple x86 PCs, but it's difficult and certainly not blessed by Apple. --Gwern (contribs) 00:05, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I use the current version of Firefox on one machine and the v2.0 beta on another. Probably going to switch to using v2.0 on both as it has many of the options I like (e.g. recovery of tabs from last session) built in and extensions for others (e.g. cloning a tab). When working on templates I will frequently clone a tab to show what it looked like before the change and then update the original tab and do a 'side by side' comparison. Likewise I will often open my watchlist in a tab and then clone off tabs for each page on the list I want to review. The recursive nature of the pop-ups script helps with that as I will often get the pop up, go to the history option, get the pop-up of the page history, hover over the 'last' links... and thus get a pop-up of the change to the page without ever clicking a link - if the change looks like something I want to review/comment on I'll open a new tab. I rewrote the search window logic for Wikipedia to perform a default 'Go' action rather than 'search' and generally use that for navigating around now... only drawback to that is when I am on Wiktionary or another project I'll often forget and type something in there and get the Wikipedia page rather than the Wiktionary page. Have vandalproof and similar tools, but don't use them much any more. I actually use Excel and Word for alot of 'automation'... copying things out to word for search and replace or Excel for formatting or building something which follows a formulaic progression. Haven't looked into AWB yet - powerful tool, but a computer can't detect and adjust for subtle differences the way a human can. --CBD 15:14, 6 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

AWB has an interactive mode and a an automatic mode. I'm pretty sure most of the users use it in interactive mode. It includes a full editor and can accept lists of pages, so when you save the page you are working on, it automatically loads the next page on the list for you to work on. When in interactive mode, you are always in control. Hope that description helps. It barely scratches the surface, of course. The Transhumanist   07:58, 10 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A good example of Word and Excel usage to make editing easier can be seen at Wikipedia:Featured content. The articles displayed at the top of that page are randomly selected each time the page is refreshed. The selection is made from a list of former 'articles of the day', but with all 'demoted' featured articles removed. To create that list I used the following procedure;

1. Copy the contents of Wikipedia:Former featured articles into Word as plain text (seconds)
2. Use global replace to remove extra line breaks, bullets between article names, et cetera (five minutes)
3. Compare 'demoted' list against the Article of the day archive (three hours)

   Note, there is no simple list of these available anywhere or this step could have been completed in minutes by an Excel 'vlookup'

4. Use vlookup in Excel to mark dates with demoted featured articles (one minute)
5. Sort article date list so that all demoted dates are separated from non-demoted dates (seconds)
6. Copy non-demoted dates and put a 'rand()' result next to each. Sort on the 'rand()' values to create a randomized list. (seconds)
7. Use text formulas to convert this randomized list to the content of Wikipedia:Featured content/SetDate (a few minutes to set up, seconds to reuse)
8. Copy and paste the results onto the SetDate page

Similar examples can be thought up for any sort of data or list manipulation. With the formulas and automated tools in most word processing and spreadsheet applications you can quickly complete work which might otherwise take days. --CBD 15:12, 10 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I have both of those programs, so I guess it's time to read the manuals.  The Transhumanist   06:14, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I use Firefox on Windows. Lupin's popups was causing excessive memory usage on an older machine, so I rely heavily on keymarks, much in the tradition of unix aliases. For instance: "con $username" shows someone's contributions, "wiki $search" shows google with site:en.wikipedia.org, "wikic $search" shows google with site:en.wikipedia.org inurl:wiki/category (and others for templates, wikipedia space, etc), "cnt $username" runs an edit count of the user, "slog1 $username" uses Special:Log to show who $user has blocked, "slog2 $username" to show when they've been blocked, etc.

In addition, I have a small Firefox extension that lets me run "w $page", and it will show the page. But also, if "[[..]]" is spotted in the page name, it will ignore anything before and after the square brackets. As a result, I don't have to do anything special to make wikilinks work easily in IRC or email or personal notes, I just copy-n-paste a line over, and the non-wikilink text is ignored. (granted, it ignores the 2nd, 3rd, etc. wikilinks, but in 95% of the cases, you're interested in copy-n-pasting just the first link on a line) (actually, my keymarks setup is a little more complicated than that, but you can see my latest keymarks here)

Per above, if you're not using tabs and middle-click a lot, you're not moving fast enough. Also, if you want to rack up your edit count with Special:Random, tabs are a good way. Set up a bookmark folder with 40 bookmarks to Special:Random. Open it up, and ctrl-f4 until you find a page that needs to be tweaked. Fix it, and keep ctrl-f4ing. When there are no tabs left, open the bookmark-folder again. It's probably a bit tough on the server, but it minimizes waiting time. --Interiot 02:28, 7 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is your head spinning from reading the previous section? Okay, let's see if I can translate the above...  The Transhumanist   07:49, 10 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"$" stands for "string", which means the keystrokes you need to enter. "$search" means "the search string", "$username" means "type in a username here", etc.

Mozilla's name for keymarks is "smart keywords", and the link provided explains how to set up keywords for search boxes.

To set up an edit counter smart keyword using this method, you've got to find one that has a search box. Here's one: Interiot's external edit counter. It's slow, but good. When you use it to look soemone up, switch to another window and work on something for a minute or two while you are waiting for the results. Use the procedure at "smart keywords" to create a command for it.

You might be asking right about now: "How did Interiot get "con $username" to show someone's contributions?" Well, he cheated. He wrote his own Firefox extension (he'll let us know when it's ready for release). However, there is a standard way to do this in Firefox:

1. In Firefox, create a new bookmark (Bookmarks/Manage Bookmarks/New Bookmark)
2. Enter 'User's contributions' as Name (without the quotes).
3. Enter 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/%s' as Location.
4. Enter 'con' as Keyword.
5. Click OK.

To test this, first type ^L (Ctrl-L) to jump right to the location box, and then type 'con interiot' in the location box of Firefox. (Where the current URL, or internet address, is displayed at the top of the screen).

To set up a block log lookup smart keyword ("slog1 $username", above), use the same procedure, just change the data accordingly, like this:

1. In Firefox, create a new bookmark (Bookmarks/Manage Bookmarks/New Bookmark)
2. Enter 'block log' as Name (without the quotes).
3. Enter 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=block&user=%s
4. Enter 'slog1' as Keyword.
5. Click OK.

To test, hit ^L (Ctrl-L), and type 'slog1 interiot' into Firefox's location box.

In case you haven't guessed yet, "%s" means "string" in Firefox, or more precisely the "string variable". But when inserting it as code, you don't replace it with anything (you do that in the address box when you use the smart keyword).

To provide the above URL, I typed in "Special:Log" in Wikipedia's search box, and then I set up the log search the way I wanted, and then modified the URL in Firefox's location box, added "%s", and then cut and pasted it in above.

You may be wondering where Interiot and I got the names for the special commands of Wikipedia. They can be found at Help:Special page. The underlying linknames (that is, the real names) for Wikipedia's "special" commands are not always the same as the way they are displayed in the special menu, so it helps to know about that page.

In most cases, Google does a better job of searching Wikipedia than Wikipedia's own search box. [Note that Google will be days to weeks out of date, though. Rich Farmbrough, 23:23 10 November 2006 (GMT).] Here's how to set up a smart keyword for a site-specific search (of Wikipedia) using Google:

1. In Firefox, create a new bookmark (Bookmarks/Manage Bookmarks/New Bookmark)
2. Enter 'Google search of Wikipedia' as Name (without the quotes).
3. Enter 'http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=site:en.wikipedia.org+%s'
4. Enter 'wiki' as Keyword.
5. Click OK.

To test, hit ^L (Ctrl-L), and type 'wiki meaning of life' into Firefox's location box.

To set up a google search of the category namespace in Wikipedia, do the following:

1. In Firefox, create a new bookmark (Bookmarks/Manage Bookmarks/New Bookmark)
2. Enter 'Search category namespace' as Name (without the quotes).
3. Enter 'http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=site%3Aen.wikipedia.org+inurl%3Awiki%2Fcategory+%s&btnG=Search'
4. Enter 'wikic' as Keyword.
5. Click OK.

To test, hit ^L (Ctrl-L), and type 'wikic google' into Firefox's location box.

To set up smart keywords for each of the other namespaces just repeat the steps above but change the description and url by replacing the word "category" with the name of the namespace you want, like "portal", and then change the c at the end of "wikic" to the first letter of the namespace. In this example, make it "wikip"

Besides article space, the various namespaces on Wikipedia are: Category, Portal, Help, Wikipedia, Template, Image, User, and MediaWiki.

Interiot didn't cover this, but I prefer the advanced search window of Google, and so here's how to set a smart keyword to search Wikipedia with Google advanced:

1. In Firefox, create a new bookmark (Bookmarks/Manage Bookmarks/New Bookmark)
2. Enter 'Adv search Wikipedia' as Name (without the quotes).
3. Enter 'http://www.google.com/search?as_q=%s&num=100&hs=lnk&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&as_occt=title&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F&as_rights=&safe=images'
4. Enter 'w' as Keyword.
5. Click OK.

I've set it to show 100 results.

To test, hit ^L (Ctrl-L), and type 'w Glossary of' into Firefox's location box.

So now you know how to turn Firefox's location box into a command line. But to load all of interiot's keymarks into Firefox manually could take a long time. We can either wait for interiot to finish and release the firefox extention he is working on, or we can create a bookmark file to import into Firefox. I'm looking into the latter, 'cuz I'd like to start using these right away.

Why use tabs at all? Interiot mentioned that "if you're not using tabs and middle-click a lot, you're not moving fast enough". Creating tabs is easy, just press ^T (Ctrl-T) to create a new empty tab, while middle clicking on a link opens a new tab with contents of the page the link you clicked on leads to. Tabs can be navigated very rapidly using ^Tab (Ctrl-Tab), and you don't have to lift up on the ctrl key before pressing tab again. Shift-Ctrl-Tab navigates through the tabs in the opposite direction.

Firefox extensions, like Linky, expand this functionality to be even more powerful. Linky lets you load all the links on a page into tabs in one operation: Once you have Linky installed, highlight all or part of the text on a page by holding down the left mouse button starting at the top of the page and drag the mouse to the bottom of the page. Then right-click to bring up the drop-down menu, and click on Linky, and then click on "Open selected links in tabs". A list of all the links will come up with a little checkbox next to each in case there are links you don't want opened in tabs, deselect any you don't want, and then click on "Open selected links". Linky doesn't open tabs for duplicate links (a convenient feature).

Interiot's example of creating a lot of tabs on random articles requires using an external website. The same thing can be done right in the window you are on, without going anywhere, by middle-clicking on "Random article" rapidly 40 times (I suggest 80) at the sidebar menu. Then use ^F4 (Ctrl-F4) to cycle through them.

I didn't realize how fast middle click was until interiot mentioned trying it. I don't know what your middle button does, but when I click my scroll wheel (it also serves as the middle button), it invokes a very fast scroll mode (unless I click on a link). The scrolling doesn't apply to Wikipedia's edit window, as it scrolls the whole article/page. But it's great for skimming/scrolling through long articles. It's funny how long you I've gone without learning this useful feature that was literally right at my fingertips.

For more advice on how to use tabs effectively, see Ansell's post immediately below.  The Transhumanist   08:54, 10 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I use Firefox under both Windows (Uni) and Linux (Home). I am a pretty simple kind of editor, with the exception of the 50+ tabs I usually generate during a session. Couldn't do without tabs!

I am doing some initial research into an Open Source .NET library to use against the api.php and similar Wikipedia interfaces, as I have not found any .NET open source libraries for doing similar things. I would rather use a standalone client which just gets XML responses as it reduces the server load, and means I do not have to cope with Firefox taking up large amounts of memory (as expected with 50 tabs). Ansell 02:39, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

How do you keep track of what's in 50 tabs!? Do you have any special ways which make 50 tabs manageable?  The Transhumanist   14:03, 7 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

For navigation I use "Control-Tab" with the Tab Mix Plus extension to give me listings of what are in each of the tabs. I also used to use another extension which gave me a screen full of miniature icons for each tab, but that one used too much RAM so I got rid of it.

I also use an extension called Aging Tabs, which makes tabs that I have not been to recently gradually go black (or any other colour I choose).

I also make sure that newly opened tabs have italic titles so that I know if I have middle-clicked and then not gone to the resulting tab. (See Tab Mix Plus for this one)

Tab Mix Plus also gives me the option of opening new tabs next to the current tab, and in a "different order", so that related tabs always stay next to each other. The default which opens new tabs on the far-right doesn't make logical sense to me. I think that is the main set of things that I do to make tabs useful and manageable. Ansell 22:19, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I use Firefox by choice, with two primary (power) machines, and a networked laptop. I have other machines where I have Firefox with plugins but no other tools, and none of my database in general. At work I use IE, as Firefox is reserved for my on-laptop wiki, avoiding all the proxy problems of a large organisation. I use the spellcheck addin with firefox and linky to open lists of pages generated externally. I rarely have more than one window open, but can easily get to twenty or thirty tabs in normal usage (I beleive I have an algorithm which supresses openning new tabs and promotes closing of old ones as the number of tabs increases). I make extensive use of AWB for manual editing and for robotic editing using a robot account. I use perl to extract lists of articles that need fixing from database dumps - and to extract stats. Oh yes, I have used various anti-vandal tools, but generally find Anti-VandalBot and the speed and accuracy of other vandal fighters makes it fairly fruitless. Rich Farmbrough, 11:03 7 November 2006 (GMT).

I've tried a bunch of browsers (Netscape, Firefox, Seamonkey, Camino, Safari, Internet Explorer) on my iMac, and have found that Safari beats them all, and by far. The normal Google search up at the top right is instead where I type whatever comes after "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/", for a direct approach to the article that is a lot faster than editing it in the address bar. If I want to use Google I hit ⌘⌥G (or if Wikipedia, I append "wikipedia" to the search words). Also, if you put an exclamation mark at the end of whatever you typed in, it gives you the first result in Google. For editing or researching Wikipedia that is handy if you can't guess the name of an article. If anybody wants to try the same approach, just mention it on my talk page or here! ;)

I also have a "Wiki to-do" folder in my bookmarks (not the bookmarks bar or menu), that I stick articles in that I need to edit later, other webpages that I need to use for a Wikipedia article, or just something I want to read later.

When doing my daily editing I use one window with many tabs, and when VFing, I use VandalFighter, which gives me a ton of seperate windows with one tab. Vitally, I play my favorite iTunes playlist during all editing hours. :) X [Mac Davis] (SUPERDESK|Help me improve) 17:25, 7 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have some questions for you:

1. When you said "I hit G", did you mean that you click on a G (Google) icon on your toolbar?
2. Why append "wikipedia" to the end of a google search when you can just hit another G, such as this: G. (To save this to your toolbar, just left-click, drag, and drop it there.)
3. Yes, I'd like to try the same approach. I tried the exclamation point thing, but I'm not sure I understood your description, as it doesn't seem to be doing anything different. Can you provide step-by-step instructions?

 The Transhumanist   23:23, 14 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I use Firefox on my home machines (or Opera on the too-frequent occasions when Firefox 2.0 is in a crashing sort of mood) and Portable Firefox on a USB drive whenever I edit WP from uni (all Windows). I used to have 'wp' set as a shortcut in the Firefox toolbar (for example, if I typed 'wp Wikipedia:Articles for deletion' then it would take me to that page instead of having to type the full URL) but I haven't got round to redoing it since I reformatted my laptop. I use AWB occasionally, nowadays I generally use it for fixing disambig links more than anything else. Cynical 19:28, 7 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Do you mean that you replace links that lead to a disambig page rather than to the appropriate page?  The Transhumanist   23:33, 14 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I use Firefox 2.0 on my tablet and desktop which both run a modified version of Windows XP. I'm in the process of developing a bot (DallasBot) using Python with PyWikipediaBot. The most efficient method of browsing online I've devised is:

• g <search> does a google search
• w <search> opens that page in the Wikipedia
• d <search> opens that page at dictionary.reference.com
• t <search> opens that page at thesaurus.reference.com

I use the "w" one more than anything, of course. One thing I enjoy doing when I go to any article is converting local units into metric and vice-versa according to standards set at WP:MOS. For that, I can just type, for example, "Ctrl+T g 89 mi in km" and I have the conversion using google's handy calculator service :). It's a great idea to learn shortcuts.. Alt+P for preview, Alt+S for save, Alt+H for history, Alt+E for edit, Alt+D for discussion, etc. Also, I use AWB for disambiguation repair but I really enjoy using it to do complex regular expression edits. Another great program for batching regular expression edits when you're working on a single page (say you want to convert a horizontal list (list item 1 {{!}} list item 2 {{!}} ... {{!}} list item n) into a vertical list, you can go into Notepad++, key Ctrl+H, and tell it to replace | with \n and it automatically makes a bulleted list for you (assuming you have regular expression enabled on the Replace window.) drumguy8800 C T 12:21, 14 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Very interesting. I've been wondering if there is a way to search and/or replace carriage returns in Notepad and Wordpad. Is there? And is there a way to enter ASCII codes into the search/replace strings?  The Transhumanist   12:38, 14 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yup, this is pretty similar to how I work. "w $page" is most important. I use "wiki $searchterms" frequently too, to run a google "site:en.wikipedia.org $searchterms" when I don't know the exact pagename (or "hist $page" when I know the pagename and it's a redirect and don't want to follow the redirect). Re: Transhumanist... Use a better editor... either Notepad++ or Vim (my preference) or something. --Interiot 13:06, 14 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, it's Notepad++ that I use, from sourceforge: Notepad++. On a sidenote, whenever I see a "$" in coding, I flip out. I'm used to object-oriented and html/dhtml/xhtml/xml/whateverothermlmlml not PHP and whatever mush that is. :D. drumguy8800 C T 13:24, 14 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I use Firefox 2.0 on Linux. To edit, I use either xemacs or kile for LaTeX or even vi (or gvim) for complex editing or console context. When I need a specific tool, I look first at linux toolbox, then I use the tool which seems the most suitable to me (bash, sed, awk, m4, etc., C, Yacc, Lex, C++, C++ with Qt, Pliant) for my purpose and usually use some Makefile. pom 18:48, 27 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I usually work with Windows XP on my desktop computer and Ubuntu on my laptop. My browser is Firefox 2.0 on both of them. I use to translate articles from Spanish, Catalan or English Wikipedias to Aragonese one, so I use to open the articles in different languages in different tabs in order to compare them and make a good translation. I also have a lot of bookmarks on my toolbar. About editors, I don't like vi, I know that sometimes it's necessary, but also is difficult to handle. Normally I programme with Gedit or NEdit. Nevertheless I think that a good programmer must know at least how to work with vi, because could be very important if you don't have a graphical interface for example in a limited system. --Willtron (?) 21:10, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Something that I could not live without is the vertigo add-on for firefox. It places the list of tabs vertically on the left side of the screen, and makes it possible to use about 30-40 tabs efficiently in one browser window on a normal monitor. If you normally only use a few tabs it is not efficient, because it would then cause a lot of empty space. I also use voice-activated macros and dictation by voice recognition because I have some difficulty using the keyboard/mouse. The program to use for that is dragon naturally speaking professional. Unfortunately its a very expensive program, but the cheaper versions only offer rudimentary support for macros. ssepp^(talk) 21:45, 9 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I use the latest version of Firefox on Window's XP. I've got the Google search bar with added search engines for Flickr, Dictionary.com, USA Today, and, of course, Wikipedia. I also utilize Firefox's Bookmarks tool bar. I typically have no less than three tabs for WP pages at all times. At least two others for other pages. I've tried downloading some WP extensions, or whatever they're called, but until I get my connection running better, I don't think it's going to work. LaraLove^T/_C 06:00, 28 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Until about two months ago I used Opera (Internet suite) almost exclusively, with some minor help from IE7. After Twinkle conked out in Opera, I started to use Firefox more, and found it more pleasant to use and read Wikipedia then the other browsers (although if Twinkle becomes usable in Opera, I'll go back to it, do to tab switching issues). I've downloaded NPWatcher and AWB (which I'm still learning how to use). I occasionally vandal-fight using freenodes #vandalism-en-wp channel. Smokizzy (talk) 20:48, 3 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I use a computer with a Windows XP Operating System and Internet Explorer. My external interfaces are simple. I dont open Wikipedia in more than 1 window. Previously, I used to add or edit content by making use of the edit screen. However, in the past few days, I've got accustomed to typing out an article on notepad and copying and pasting the content paragraph by paragraph. I am also an approved user of AutoWikiBrowser and VandalProof. I havent made any edits with AutoWikiBrowser as I've found its functioning to be pretty confusing. However, I love using Vandal Proof as it makes tagging of vandalism and vandalism reversion extremely easy.-Ravichandar 08:28, 6 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As far as external interfaces, I am fairly simple. Depending on what I want to do for the day, I boot to one of the following: Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP Pro SP2, or Windows Vista Ultimate. I use Firefox (currently version 3.0 Beta 2) primarily, relatively unmodded, but I also recently have started using AutoWikiBrowser for semi-automated tasks (great for disambiguating links). Thus the only reason I still have WinXP is for program compatibility. AutoWikiBrowser does not work on Linux (obviously, as stated in the FAQ page) but strangely, it doesn't work very well in Vista, either. It comes up with the same bug on 50% of pages in Wikipedia(see the AWB bugs section). I tried "Linky" (extension for Firefox) once before, but it has found little use, since AWB can do the same thing. I keep "My Watchlist" in my bookmarks, and Wikipedia is the active search engine in the search bar 90% of the time. Whenever on Wikipedia, I ALWAYS have several tabs open, for instance, right now I have Google personalized homepage, My Watchlist, My VC coaching page, Weta Digital (was randomly reading on CG in LOTR, I often will just read through WP, clicking interesting links as I go), and the page that mimics this page, for internal interfaces (where I will respond next).--Vox Rationis (Talk | contribs) 15:18, 11 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]