Offprint

An editor should be the part of a writing tool you stop noticing. Ours was not always that. A click that didn’t land in the text, a keystroke that went missing, a toolbar that covered the line you were writing: small things, but they break concentration, and concentration is the whole point. We spent a long time chasing those problems one at a time. Each fix was real, but the causes kept returning, because they all came from the same place: the way the editor was built. So we rebuilt it from the ground up. This article was written in the new editor, and most of what you see in it is the real thing rather than a picture of it. Type a slash and start typing, to add any block.Built to stay out of your way Every block in your article, from a paragraph to a gallery, is now its own self-contained editor. The page around them looks after everything between blocks: where your cursor goes, what you have selected, what moves when you drag. Clicks land where you click. Typing goes where you type. A block can’t take over the page anymore. It also means each block can be designed for what it is, instead of around the limits of the editor holding it. You will see that most in the places that used to be hardest: images, buttons, other complex blocks and your phone. Working across blocks is better too. Select several at once by sweeping the margin, then move, copy or delete them together. Undo covers the whole article and puts your cursor back where it was. Three blocks, one image among them, moved into a later section together.Images, given room Drop one image and you get an image. Drop several and you get a grid, up to twelve, as a mosaic that keeps each picture’s shape or locked to a ratio. All photos sourced from Unsplash, individual photo credits in alt text.Drag a picture to reorder it, or carry it straight from a grid into a carousel. Carousels show one image at a time or a strip of several, and can advance on their own, pausing whenever a reader focuses them. Turn a grid into a carousel, swap pictures, set width and ratio, add alt text and links, and let it play on its own.Your article’s preview image now comes from the article itself. Choose any image in the body, or upload one in settings, and that is what appears on Bluesky and in your subscribers’ inboxes. Pick the preview from the article’s own images, then choose how the link card looks.Footnotes in the margin Long-form writing leans on notes, so they now sit where a reader expects them. On a wide screen a footnote appears in the margin beside the line that cites it, and on a phone it opens under a tap. Writing on your phone Phones were where the old editor struggled most, and where the rebuild shows most clearly. Formatting, block settings and links open in sheets above the keyboard, and the line you are writing stays in view. Nothing jumps and nothing gets covered. On a phone, formatting, blocks, images, links and buttons each open in a sheet above the keyboard.Publishing you can see coming Publishing now takes the whole screen instead of a small dialog, and shows you everything before anything goes out. Choose to publish now, schedule it or backdate it, in your publication’s timezone. Decide whether this post is emailed to your subscribers, with the count right there. See the link card as it will appear on Bluesky and in search. Before anything goes out: when, who gets an email, what readers will see, and anything worth fixing.A short list of checks runs before it goes out: a missing title, images without alt text, a search description that runs long. Each one has a button that takes you straight to the fix. Updating a post you have already published works the same way. The screen lists exactly what will change, the old value above the new one, and an update never emails anyone a second time. Updating a live post lists exactly what changes, and never emails anyone twice.Settings beside your writing Settings now sit beside the editor instead of in a separate dialog, and save as you go. On a post that is already live, a change to its settings waits for your next publish, so you can adjust the URL, tags or search description without your readers seeing a half-finished edit. Anything waiting is marked, and you can undo it with one click. Settings changes on a live post wait for your next publish, each one marked so you can revert it.Every saved version is named for what changed, like “Changed the title” or “Published”, so finding the one you want in your history takes a glance. Open any of them to read it as it was, and restore it if you need to. Every save is kept, named for what it changed. Open any of them to read it as it was, and restore it if you need to.What changes for your readers ☝🏽 Nothing you have published changes. An article moves to the new editor the first time you open it, and readers see any difference only after you publish again. Your writing is still stored in your own repository, in the same open format as before. --- Under the hood For the curious, here is the short version. The previous editor was built on TipTap, a framework over ProseMirror, the toolkit behind most serious web editors. It treated the whole article as one document in one editor, and that editor claimed every input on the page. Every block lived inside it and had to negotiate for focus, keystrokes and pastes. Most of the problems we chased came from that negotiation. The new editor drops TipTap and uses ProseMirror directly, with one instance per block. Each block owns its own text and nothing else, and the page coordinates between them. The editor owns the blocks, instead of the blocks owning the editor. What is stored has not changed, so the same article reads the same way on your publication, in email, and to every app reading it from the AT Protocol. --- Rolling out The new editor is rolling out to Pro writers over the coming weeks, and comes to free writers after that. When it reaches you, open any article and start writing.