Hacker News Reader

Comment by LordAtlas | Hacker News Reader

Gutenberg is an absolute piece of crap, and is a UX nightmare. It exists solely for massaging Matt's ego.

Every single non-designer person I've created a Wordpress site for has yelled loud abuses at it and told me to disable it because they "just want to write a fucking blog post, not design a new web page each time". And each time I have to install a plugin to do that. Who the hell wants to create new blocks for each sub-heading and paragraph when they're writing regular articles? The old editor is much easier to use.

View on HN

I was this 100% about... 6 months ago.

Then I got to understand how easy Gutenberg actually is.

You can just type and press enter. That's it. Click a block, switch it to a header. Or a paragraph. Easy.

I think one thing people don't realize is at the bottom of the editor there are breadcrumbs, and they allow you to select within the hierarchy of blocks you are working in - for things like columns for example. Before I noticed this, I hated Gutenberg, now I can just click the breadcrumb to select my block and a lot of frustration is resolved.

I know, unintuitive interfaces are bad, and this feels totally hacky, and I hope that it gets better, but knowing how to use this has made Gutenberg a joy for me to use over the old editor.

> Who the hell wants to create new blocks for each sub-heading and paragraph when they're writing regular articles? The old editor is much easier to use.

You add new paragraphs by just pressing enter, and you make it a heading by typing (part of) "/heading". It's less work than in the old editor, and it even produces reasonable markup (entirely unlike the old editor). If you don't want to design a new web page, just... don't? You don't need to press every button available.

> and you make it a heading by typing (part of) "/heading"

or markdown-style hashes! (+ a space after)

I'm also not a fan of Gutenberg, which is why I still use the classic editor... which they make harder and harder to find with each update.

Disable Gutenberg does much the same thing and, unsurprisingly, is a very popular plug-in! https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-gutenberg/

There is no guarantee that this will work for the next years, as the author itself states in the plugin page:

> “I can’t make any promises, but I intend to develop with WordPress for the long-haul. Who knows what the future holds, but the plan is to keep Disable Gutenberg going for many years to come.”

The only official way to use the classic editor is by installing the Classic Editor plugin and WordPress will stop supporting it by the end of 2021.

I prefer Gutenberg, but I will be stuck with this for years for the legacy sites from clients that demand them. I'm not installing it because I want to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com