Hi all,
Dale suggested in another thread that it would be interesting to discuss our work-flows.
The topic which prompted this was our new practice of trying to adhere to the use of the User:fasname convention to refer to named participants in conversations. Previously we have just used WikiNames, which for the most part are modeled FirstnameLastname. The only way to find these User:fasnames is to search the wiki. The WikiNames are easy to guess most of the time and require less searching.
I asked in our recent IRC meeting about workflows and was told that most people just edit the wiki directly. More power to you! I think I would go nuts trying to do that. I have been using the following chain of tools.
Writing my Beat: 1. LyX -> 2. ASCII export -> 3. Vim -> 4. Firefox with "It's All Text" extension to edit wiki.
Preparing mailshot: 1. Firefox -> 2. Vim
LyX: It's main advantage for me was that I could move paragraphs and sentences around and references would automatically be re-numbered. A disadvantage was some weird treatment of some diphthongs during export to ASCII. Something I "kept meaning to fix".
Vim: I have a bunch of macros set up to do things such as: convert CamelCase to [[CamelCase|Camel Case]] and other handy wiki markup. It's also great for the mailshot for reformatting the cut and paste from the wiki page as it allows me to change the indentations in blocks easily. Change how the headings are formatted and some other stuff.
It's All Text: Suggested to me aeons ago by Karsten Wade. It allows you to define an editor of your choice (in my case Vim) to be opened to edit any text area on a webpage. The editor runs as normal except that when you save/write it pipes the content back into the textarea of the webpage saving you an irritating cut and paste.
As things stand now I have a nice dictionary of users and their camel case names and Vim warns me with highlighting if there's a completely new name. This saves me time in searching/checking names. If there's no way to get a text file containing fasnames and first+lastnames from the wiki then I'm condemned to searching for each one manually unless I learn them! As far as my current workflow goes this change is a backward step. I'm going to see if I can automate something based on the zodbot stuff that Dale mentioned.
The references change means that using LyX is now no longer necessary. I can just cut out that step and use Vim. As far as I'm concerned that's great. The only possible thing is that I need to figure out a way to fold/hide the reference so that it's visually less intrusive inline and I can concentrate on the flow of the text.
Anyway, that's probably more than anyone wanted to know. But I heartily recommend the "It's All Text" extension[1].
1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125
Best,