I’m writing this post on Write, the new text composer/editor on WordPress.com. According to the official blog post, Write is a response to last year’s Creators survey, where “‘simplify the editor’ was the single most-requested improvement from the people already publishing on WordPress.com”. The tool itself was originally created by WordPress developer Jamie Marsland, with the WordPress.com team then adopting/adapting it. According to Marsland:
WordPress is extraordinary software. But when you sit down to write a blog post, you’re greeted by a dashboard, a sidebar, an admin bar, a block inserter, a settings panel, and dozens of options that have nothing to do with the words you’re about to put down. For writers — especially those who aren’t developers — it’s a lot of visual noise between you and a blank page. Write strips all of that away.
So far, Write looks good to me. WordPress.com ruined the writing experience when it introduced Gutenberg. Many bloggers have already commented that WordPress.com should just have brought back the Classic editor, i.e. the TinyMCE editor. I don’t think the Classic editor produces blocks when you publish, so it can’t benefit from the advantages of the block editor, such as they are.
However, I also don’t think WordPress.com needs to go that far back to restore a good writing experience. Calypso, the WordPress.com front-end before Gutenberg, was remarkably smooth and conducive to writing. WordPress.com has been bloated for a long time; the “you’re greeted by a dashboard, a sidebar, an admin bar, a block inserter, a settings panel, and dozens of options” was as true of Gutenberg as it was of prior versions. What changed was the additional bloat of Gutenberg, which made the writing experience unwieldy and unsupportive of the speed of thinking, as it were.
Since the launch of Gutenberg with WordPress 5.0 (and then Full-Site Editing with v5.9), I’ve considered the editor that shipped with Ghost.org, Koenig, to be the gold standard. To be clear, I’m restricting myself to editors that ship along with publishing platforms, rather than including standalone editors (in that case, my current favourite is Sublime Text). Ghost built Koenig on the Lexical framework and ever since its launch in 2018, it has been damn smooth.
Koenig and Gutenberg both allow the writer (composer) to invoke blocks in the writing area. In Gutenberg alone, however, the view-port would jump back and forth depending on which paragraph the cursor was on, the cursor wouldn’t move in an intuitive war, the font in the composing area would change depending on the site theme, and there would be a noticeable lag when invoking a block or moving between paragraphs on a long article (1,000+ words across 5-6+ paragraphs).
If Write is to stay good, it needs to beat Koenig (although hosting with WordPress remains a lot cheaper than hosting with Ghost, so there’s that). That means making Write easy to find, introducing and harmonising keyboard shortcuts — even now, Ctrl+S sometimes saves the post, sometimes asks to save the webpage —, supporting Markdown, and removing all of the clunk that belaboured Gutenberg.
Most of all, as more and more writers use Write in different ways, the people at WordPress.com should streamline the feedback and changes that arise in a way that doesn’t compromise the raison d’être of Write. Losing track of that spirit was what gave us the Gutenberg writing experience in the first place.
Featured image: A preview of the new Write editor. Credit: WordPress.com.