I 100% agree that some kind of shorter syntax for <syntaxhighlight> is needed.

If you don't use lang="whatever", it also places the page in a maintenance category, until some Wikipedian comes along and adds lang="whatever". So to properly use this tag, you really need to type <syntaxhighlight lang="whatever">. Which is just a ton of typing.

Throw in the inline keyword that I use a lot, and that means even more typing: <syntaxhighlight lang="whatever" inline>

I'm getting tired of all this typing. A solution is needed.

@cscott @ssastry Wondering if you have any thoughts on this front. As far as I know, it is not currently possible to extend the wikitext tokeniser from an extension right ? But maybe we can have ` generate <code>, and then have a hook to intercept that and be fed to SyntaxHighlight ?

This is still on my mind two years later.

If I were designing wiki syntax from scratch, I'd say copy something industry standard like Reddit/Discord/GitHub markdown, which uses single backticks for one line code, and triple backticks for code blocks. But implementing backticks would likely mess up a bunch of existing wikicode that uses backticks. And it would be complicated to code, likely adding a completely new syntax to wikicode.

So at this point, I think the best solution to get this ticket moving is the following:

• <shi> as an alias of <syntaxhighlight inline>
• <sh> as an alias of <syntaxhighlight>

These are so much shorter and easier to type than the existing solutions of <code><nowiki>, <syntaxhighlight inline>, and <syntaxhighlight>. These would also still support parameters such as lang, while keeping the tag length reasonable. For example, <sh lang="js">.

Change #1015469 had a related patch set uploaded (by Novem Linguae; author: Novem Linguae):

[mediawiki/extensions/SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi@master] Add <sh> and <shi> parser tags

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1015469