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You could I suppose but you run the risk of losing your work in the browser. It is a trade off.

“You” are a developer, why the heck are “you” working in a textarea rather than a proper editor? Updating a readme is not the sort of thing that you have to do urgently from a coffee shop while on holiday in South Asia...

Apparently the README is very important for this project. How else could I learn that it's the most downloaded python package and that I can certainly trust it?

you can certianly trust it

Tbf, a lot of python projects have .rst README files, and getting a local preview can be more of a pain than looking at the GH preview in the browser.

That doesn’t apply in this case, though, where the README is markdown

> Tbf, a lot of python projects have .rst README files, and getting a local preview can be more of a pain than looking at the GH preview in the browser.

rst may be less popular than md but there's no shortage of local preview options, including plugins/extensions for popular editors.

Even for .rst, the Github editor lets you create a new branch. More likely, they simply didn't feel that was particularly important.

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