Flashy but useless "distraction free editor"

Looking at the feedback here, lots of other people don’t like it either.

The only reason people normally come to a support forum, is to ask for help, or complain.

Therefore, the only comments about the distraction free editor you would see on here, would be asking for help, or complaining.

Rest assured, it has a lot of love around the internet. I personally don’t care either way…. Perhaps somebody will make a suitable plugin for you.

The announcements about the distraction free writing were made a long time ago. Many many opportunities were given to provide feedback on the front-end. The support was there, or it wouldn’t have gone in. These things are community decisions. If you don’t like the decisions, get involved! That’s the best way to change things before-hand.

The point now is that it’s gone. I doubt it will come back in.
WordPress has been moving in the direction of a cleaner, leaner interface. And a code base carrying much less weight. One that is simpler to use, for the common user. Not you specifically, not me specifically.

The inclusion of so many editors seems counter productive to that goal.

Progress is progress. Way back whenever it was when we had the last major overhaul, a few people hated that too. Some people fear progress and change. But I do believe the changes being made are for the better, for WordPress and the community as a whole……

The new “distraction free” editor removed the distraction of being able to set heading tags. How is that useful? Now I have to switch back to the puny editor to change a line to a heading. That sucks. At least there should be a keyboard shortcut. But honestly, having a way to make something a heading is pretty basic functionality I would think. Maybe WordPress should allow an “advanced” editing bar in fullscreen mode so those who want all the features get two lines of buttons that actually do most of what’s needed. It’d be better than not being able to do it.

Okay, there may be a plugin already that will do what you want. Check out Fullscreen for WP Super Edit. It may mean installing a couple plugins, but it also may fix your problem.

Hope that helps someone!

I think what’s important is to identify what you dislike about the new full-screen mode and then request that functionality. The new full-screen mode isn’t going anywhere, and while the old one could have been maintained WordPress generally tries to avoid cruft and redundant features.

I used the old full-screen mode a little and from what I can tell the new mode isn’t that different at all. The key changes that I’m assuming are annoying people are:

• No ability to have editing area expand to full width of browser window — could be fixed with a simple toggle
• Editing bar is simplified and doesn’t have full range of options presented on the main editing page — could be fixed by simply duplicating the WYSIWYG of the main editing page, even if stylised and/or toggled

Anything else?

@ryanwilliams
The one and only thing I don’t like about the new distraction-free fullscreen editor is the missing features of the toolbar. Other than that, I LOVE the look and feel of it.

@networkgeek
I did look for plugins that would help but didn’t find anything for WordPress 3.2 that actually helped. I have actually written a couple of plugins, so if I can figure out how to hook into the full-screen editor in a way that I can modify the toolbar, I just might see about tackling it myself. No promises though. I’m a little swamped with other projects right now.

+1 for adding a more complete toolbar to the full-screen visual editor.

Full screen isn’t only useful for writers — but also for editors who are cleaning up the [semantic] formatting of others. In fact, I could argue that the full-screen view is even more important for those folks trying to make sure the entire article “looks” right.

So the editors *could* click the help button and find the keyboard shortcuts for adding headings and such. But keyboard shortcuts? It’s 2011 people, not 1986. Yep, I learned all those Word Perfect formatting keys, but my guess is that many folks who’ve come to WordPress from nontechnical fields may never have used a text formatting system that wasn’t completely GUI driven. Please give them a break! (And if this means that they should be using something else to post/edit and using remote publishing protocols to actually change their text, maybe there could be a list of other editors that are recommended?)