If all goes well, you won't notice that anything has changed yet and can carry on. But, we've swapped out our markdown editor and will unveil its new powers in stages.

As of this release, what you see when you click preview now is a WYSIWYG (think Google Docs) with editing disabled. In a very near future release, we will enable editing of what you see in preview, allowing you to format posts and comments, and do everything markdown wizards can do on SN, without any knowledge of markdown. At the same time, the existing markdown experience will not change, because @sox has triumphed and created a bidirectional should-be-lossless mapping from markdown to WYSIWYG and WYSIWYG to markdown.

Some of you will remember the wysiwyg experiment I teased years ago. The reception for that was so poor that other bitcoin founders were sending me condolences via DMs and we shelved it. At the time, I didn't realize that nearly all hybrid markdown-wysiwyg systems suck, and my editor sucked, because they have unreliable mappings from one format to another (typically relying on regex and other kludge). In our research, we found that literally all hybrid markdown-wysiwyg systems, even multi-billion dollar reddit's and ones that do wysiwyg to markdown well, cannot map reliably in both directions. @sox made an editor that does.

What this will mean soon is that you can write something in markdown on SN, switch to the WYSIWYG and see how your post will look, edit it in the WYSIWYG, then switch back and see all the WYSIWYG changes in the markdown, edit the markdown, and so on. While many of us will continue to write markdown, there are things like tables that are more comfortable to create in a WYSIWYG and features like image size and alignment that markdown doesn't have a clear standard for. This editor will also allow us to add lots of nonstandard SN-specific features to posts and comments (at the fancy end you can imagine widgets) without requiring stackers read documentation.^[1] And, with markdown still first class, if we ever do anything tasteless with our WYSIWYG, you can simply use markdown instead.

Anyway, as I said, you won't notice that much has changed yet and can carry on. But, I'm super excited about this new editor and solving a problem that's been haunting me for years.

Sox and I will be standing by to fix any bugs you find. Also, No Trust November is slated for release tomorrow (after I do the newsletter to not mess with anyone's expectation of being a top post).

1. This is also a huge win for SN's developers because a reliable mapping between formats means that storing posts and comments in either format allows us to generate the other. More specifically, we can store all posts and comments in SN flavored markdown yet display them with features you only expect to see in rich text. ↩