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CMS & Content

WYSIWYG Editor

Rich Text Editor

Portrait of Lukas Horvath, co-founder of Roelu Studio
Lukas HorvathCo-founder

What is WYSIWYG Editor?

A WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get), also called a rich text editor, is a writing interface that renders formatting in real time as the editor types. Bold appears bold, headings look like headings, images sit where they will sit on the page. It is the standard input mode for any CMS aimed at non-technical writers. The alternative — writing raw HTML or markdown — is fine for developers and miserable for marketers.

Why it matters

WYSIWYG editors are how marketing teams write without learning code, but the cheap ones cause real problems. Inline styles get pasted from Word and break the brand. Fonts and colors get hardcoded into posts. Suddenly the design system is at war with whatever the editor saved last week. A good WYSIWYG editor restricts formatting to what the design system allows — headings yes, custom hot pink yes-but-no. Editors stay productive. The brand stays consistent. The site does not slowly turn into a ransom note across 200 blog posts.

How it works

The editor renders a styled text area where the writer types directly into the page. A toolbar offers formatting options — bold, italic, headings, lists, links, images, embeds. Behind the scenes, the editor saves the content as structured data (rich text blocks, often as JSON or a portable text format), not raw HTML. That structured output is then rendered on the front-end inside design-system components, so the editor's H2 always looks like a brand H2. The best ones — like Sanity's Portable Text or Notion's block editor — let teams define exactly which formatting options exist and block the rest entirely.

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