What’s an easy way to set a line or paragraph apart from the rest? It’s a simple option that you still won’t find in the Gutenberg editor.
This is not a rant against the Gutenberg editor in WordPress. I wanted to say that upfront. I still see posts from people who complain about how difficult it is to work with. Those posts still make me scratch my head. It’s not that difficult.
At least not overall.
But there are a couple things the Gutenberg editor in WordPress does that serve as annoyances. It’s not you can’t do certain things. It’s just that you can’t necessarily do them as quickly and easily as one might assume.
One of them, which I’ve covered before, is setting an external link to open in a new window. A few updates back, you had a checkbox in the same popup window when you entered the URL that you could click. When you then clicked the “Save” button on that window, you’d done all you needed to do. The link would automatically open in a new tab or window.
Now, you have to set the URL and click “Save.” Then you have to hover over the link, click edit, and then click the checkbox. That extra step makes no sense to me at all.
Here’s another formatting option I think the editor ought to have
Let’s suppose you want to set off a section of text for extra visual impact. I quoted a short passage from a movie recently. I could have simply kept the excerpt flush left along with the rest of the text of that post. But I wanted it to be clear for the reader how much was excerpted. So I wanted to indent those lines.
You can click here to see the post in question to see what I’m talking about.
I could use a quote function. Here’s an example:
A quotation automatically indents a section when you want to quote someone or quote a text. I certainly could have used that option.
But the theme I’m using adds the orange quotation marks to the left of that. On the one hand, it’s easy to see that I’m quoting something. But for a longer passage like the one in the last link, I just wanted the padding on the left without the punctuation mark.
The Gutenberg editor doesn’t give me a quick and easy way to do that. The old WordPress editor did.
I can reach that old editor from Gutenberg, but that, again, involves extra, unnecessary steps.
First, I have to add a new “block” without text. I hit enter to get to a new line, then hover and click the “+” button on the far right. Unless I’ve recently selected the classic editor, it won’t show up in the top six options. I’ll either have to search for it or click “Browse all” and find it there.
I can then select “Classic” and the new block for text appears. As soon as I begin typing, the old editor controls seem like they used to before Gutenberg came along.
I can then keep typing until I reach a section I want to indent. If I select this paragraph, for example, I can click the “increase indent right” button.
As you can see, that shoots the paragraph to the left a bit, creating the desired effect.
I can continue typing in that same block, in case I have additional lines to indent or just start a new block (like I did for this paragraph). The indented line is visually easy to spot, so the formatting “highlights” the text.
I just hate that it takes extra steps to do that. It seems like that should be a top-level option.
Aggravations like this aren’t enough to make me abandon the Gutenberg editor. But they’re certainly enough to wonder why these can’t be taken care of.
There’s no way I’m the only person who finds them to be aggravations!
