Change default wiki syntax

[toni]

The wiki supports several different formats like restructured text and html.

It would be nice if it would be possible to change the default syntax that is used in the wiki. So that you could for example use restructured text without the {{{ }}} blocks.

[daniel]

Changing the default wiki-syntax would break TracLinks, unless added to all supported wiki formats (alot of work), so this is probably not a good idea.

OTOH, it might be cool to have a popupmenu when editing a wiki page to select syntax/formatter to use. That would make adding a page entirely formatted in foosyntax more convenient.

[tonib]

You dont have to support all wiki formats. It would be enough to support all wiki formats that have implemented TracWiki features.

With the patch in #779 and #780 restructured text supports all trac features. Except having trac as code-processor but this is not that much work.

[anonymous]

I think the syntax defined by ​Markdown is far superior to most wikis, including what Trac supports. Personally, I'm sick of trying to remember how many a zillion different wiki syntaxes, and Markdown is the only one I've seen that's actually readable by human beings, even when displayed as plain-text. I'm really reluctant to force yet another wiki on my users that doesn't use something semi-standard. Using Markdown via Instiki is by far the best user experience I've found.

[anonymous]

Ditto to the last comment, I'd give anything to be able to switch away from the default Trac wiki syntax to Textile or Markdown!

[anonymous]

+1

[slamb@…]

I'm still new to trac, but my only real technical complaint with its default syntax is the linking. I don't think all CamelCase words should be a link unless manually excluded, and I would like to encourage using non-CamelCase page names. I prefer MediaWiki's link syntax and ​its usage on Wikipedia - link to only the first reference to a term, and only if it's relevant. But really, if I could just turn off autolinking to CamelCase words, I'd probably be fairly happy. trac's explicit link syntax is good enough. (Maybe I'll open a new enhancement ticket for this; it's not a much bigger change than ignore_missing_pages.)

As far as consistency with other wikis, I'm torn between the only two I think are important:

• MediaWiki, which has a pretty good syntax, and more importantly, is the one everyone is familiar with. (Raise your hands if you've heard of Wikipedia…)
• Other trac installations. It's becoming quite popular for open source projects, and it's reasonable for people to expect the same syntax to work between trac installations X and Y. If it didn't, people would get really frustrated.

If all trac users were behind a change to MediaWiki syntax, there'd be no conflict for me. But I really doubt that could happen - I think the trac developers wouldn't have chosen this syntax if they didn't like it, and every page in existing installations adds inertia.

I looked at Markdown just now and it wasn't so obviously superior as to overrule its obscurity. It's kind of nice, but looks like it'd be much easier to edit in a fixed-width capable editor than in the usual web input block.

[Christian Boos]

Replying to tonib:

You dont have to support all wiki formats. It would be enough to support all wiki formats that have implemented TracWiki features.

With the patch in #779 and #780 restructured text supports all trac features.

I think it's worth thinking about it, but it seems however highly unlikely to me that a Trac site could run successfully if reST was the default wiki syntax…