Philosophy

Most folks who publish content with Astro work in two distinct modes. We’re in coder mode when editing Astro components, pages, CSS etc. This is best done in a coding tool like VSCode.

We’re in writer mode when we’re writing or editing prose in Markdown. Editors designed for coding are not well suited to this — they have too many distractions and lack the kinds of tools which help with writing and editing prose.

Because of this, it’s common to write in tools like iA Writer or Obsidian and then switch to VSCode to add frontmatter, build and publish. The workflow often looks something like this:

1. Create a new draft markdown file & start writing
2. Edit and tweak (maybe over a number of sessions)
3. Add frontmatter for things like description, tags etc
4. Build & run locally to check everything works
5. Push to GitHub and deploy/publish

Steps 1-3 are very much writer mode tasks, while 4 & 5 are definitely coder mode tasks.

Astro Editor is only concerned with the former.

Core Principles

1. Astro Editor is an interface for your content

In a local Astro site, the content itself is just text files on disk. You might interact with them via the command line or via a text editor like VSCode. Both are just interfaces to your files. Astro Editor is exactly the same: it’s an interface for working with the content files in your Astro site.

2. Make Writer Mode easy

All of Astro Editor’s features are designed to make writing and editing easy and pleasant and frictionless. We won’t add features which don’t serve that goal.

3. No coder-mode stuff

Astro Editor is not concerned with coder-mode stuff at all. In practice that means:

• Code blocks are not syntax highlighted. If you have code examples in your files you’re better off authoring them in a coding tool which can properly lint, format and check them.
• There’s no mechanism for committing or publishing in Astro Editor. You should do that in a code editor or terminal or some other app designed for that.
• There’s no way to preview your writing. The best way to do that is by running your Astro site locally and looking at it in a browser.

4. Simplicity

Astro Editor values simplicity and is intentionally opinionated about its UI. We limit user customisation to “making it work with your Astro project and no more”. It’s not possible to customise the colour schemes, typeface etc. If you need fine-grained customisation & extensibility we recommend using a custom profile in VSCode (or Obsidian) which you’ve set up for Markdown editing.

This also means we fully expect Astro Editor to become finished software at some point.