Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I’d like to stick with WordPress for a while. Let’s also say that I dislike writing anything more than a sentence or two using the Gutenberg editor. (I don’t enjoy block editors anywhere.)
What are my options?
iA Writer offers my favorite writing environment. It’s just so damn nice1. It publishes to WordPress fine. The issue is that it’s a one-and-done situation. Once I hit “Publish”, any edits need to be done in WordPress. I write fast and loose, so there are always edits. Also, Writer only allows for publishing Draft posts. I never post drafts. Or, more accurately, all my posts are drafts forever. Just let me put it out there.
MarsEdit is a complete and powerful way to publish. It handles a variety of scenarios and takes many parts of WordPress into account (e.g. Featured Images, etc.). It does two-way publishing2, meaning I can write and edit in either/both Gutenberg or MarsEdit and not lose anything in translation. It has a handy plugin for extracting quotes and links from web pages. It’s author, Daniel Jalkut, is very helpful. My only beef with MarsEdit is that it’s beginning to show its age. I know, shallow, but I can’t help but be a little put off by it.
Otherwise, there’s Ulysses, but I recently uninstalled it, so that’s out.
Anything else? Maybe it’s less hassle in the long run to just use Gutenberg.