Fancy new editor mode

One of the big remaining tranches of work this year is a refinement of the editing and publishing experience. All three parts of the core writing process — writing your email, previewing the draft, and sending out the final broadcast — are ripe for improvement and reconsideration, and we’ve landed some of the initial improvements for a successor to the current rich-text / WYSIWYG experience.

We’re calling it Fancy mode, and you can self-select into it today by going into the Options menu of your writing interface:

The core of the fanciness, so to speak, are two main affordances that feel like the “correct” way to level up a text editor these days.

The first is a tooltip ribbon for inline-formatting options:

The second is an autocompletion menu for fancy blocks:

Not only is this a nice replacement for the existing experience, what both of these things due is allow for room for growth. Things that we’ve always wanted to build into the editor — support for custom fonts and colors or more smart embeds — suddenly have a place and a path as opposed to being stuffed into Yet Another Dropdown Menu.

In fact, here’s some stuff that’s just for Fancy Mode:

• A webwall, so you can break out content just for the web version of your email
• An emailwall, so you can break out content just for the email version
• Superscript and subscripts
• Surveys, to easily embed survey codes and hear more from your subscriber base.

Lots more to come, but two final notes for now:

1. As always, your feedback and ideas are greatly welcomed. We’d love to hear from you on the official roadmap item!)
2. While the explicit plan is to deprecate and remove the existing “Rich-text mode” experience in favor of ✨Fancy mode ✨, rest assured that Markdown mode is here to stay forever.