Gutenberg is a colossal step backward for WordPress editing

I am very unhappy with the decision to make Gutenberg the new default editor. The classic code editor was and still is the best and easiest way to edit a page. Why create a new visual editor that hides all of the controls and toolbars, and makes me do more work to create the same amount of content and still requires that I preview the page in order to know how it will appear once it is published? Two of the stated goals of Gutenberg are to make editing content simpler and to make it easier to create page layouts using “blocks.” This plugin fails to achieve both of these goals. Content creation just became more complicated than it needed to be and I don’t really feel like I gained anything useful.

Gutenberg finds new and exciting ways to ruin the code editor by adding a lot of unnecessary markup to my code in the form of comments before and after every major HTML element. Gutenberg is NOT a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor but it feels like it is trying to be one. The minimalist UI means that all of the controls and toolbars are hidden by default and you have to hover over elements and go digging through menus to perform simple editing tasks. I want as many controls displayed on the screen as possible and I want those controls out of the way of the content I’m editing instead of hovering over the content. You’re wasting my time making me search for controls to do simple things. The blocks are not wide enough, so writing large paragraphs of text feels horrible. You’re still better off writing in MS Word, then copying/pasting to notepad to remove all the garbage formatting, then copying/pasting into WordPress. You are wasting precious real estate on the screen by putting too much white space on the sides of the blocks, and you are not representing the actual layout of the content as it will appear on the page once it is published. It does not use the same fonts/sizes/colors as your theme, so it doesn’t make it any easier to visualize how the content will actually look. It does not display the boundaries of blocks unless you hover over one of them (and then only shows the boundary for the block you are hovering over or have selected). You cannot drag and drop blocks to reposition them – you must select a block first, then use an up or down arrow to move it. If you anchor a block to the left or right side of the page, it is more difficult to move that block up and down – you have to center align it, then move it up or down, then anchor it to the left or right again.

Gutenberg will need vast improvements before it wins me over.