Introducing WysiHat: An eventually better open source WYSIWYG editor
For a while we've been exploring switching to WYSIWYG text editing in our products. Up until this point we've been using either plain text, manual HTML, or Textile formatting. Depending on who you are it's either fine or annoying.
Context & Ripple Effects
By late 2008, the browser-based rich text editor had become a battleground of its own: WordPress shipped advanced WYSIWYG editing in WordPress 2.1 the year before, and startups like Texty were betting on dead-simple content creation tools as a product category. 37signals — which had built its products on plain text, manual HTML, and Textile formatting — is now joining that shift, but with an open source twist: rather than adopting an existing editor, it's releasing its own framework and iterating in public.
First-order effects
- 37signals' own products move toward WYSIWYG editing, ending the era where users of its tools had to know Textile or hand-write HTML to format content.
- The web development community gains a new open source building block: a WYSIWYG editor framework designed to be improved over time rather than a finished drop-in widget.
Second-order effects
- Existing JavaScript editor projects face pressure to match WysiHat's openness and extensibility, since 37signals' brand gives the project immediate visibility among Rails developers.
- Other SaaS products still using markup syntaxes face the same user-expectation problem 37signals just solved for itself — once one productivity tool offers visual editing, plain-text-only interfaces start to feel like a defect.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, editors stop being bundled features and become standalone open source infrastructure — a trajectory later visible when Twitter released its own flexible text editor API for iOS developers.
- The recurring tension between novice-friendly WYSIWYG and power-user control (which resurfaced dramatically when Slack's editor change drew backlash from Markdown loyalists) suggests the durable design answer is choice: offering both modes rather than picking a winner.
The trend: Text editing is steadily migrating from developer-oriented markup conventions toward accessible visual interfaces, increasingly delivered as reusable open source components that any product can adopt.