I am willing to bet a number of people have asked why MarsEdit does not include a WYSIWYG editor function. Fair enough question and it is met with a pretty straight forward answer in this article by Brent Simmons.

An interesting question came up in the comments for the previous post: why doesn’t MarsEdit do WYSIWYG editing?

We plan to add WYSIWYG editing in the future, but it’s not there yet.

I’m not sure what more I can say publicly about it, because this feature depends on another company making a WYSIWYG editor component available. It’s a component we’ll be able to use but that we didn’t write. (This isn’t hypothetical: it’s a real thing that’s in the works.)

The good thing about this component is that its support for HTML and style sheets is fairly complete. It’s worth the wait—but it’s not worth holding up MarsEdit 1.0 just to wait for it.

We could have done a limited WYSIWYG editor that supports the basics. But it’s not a good idea to spend time writing code that we’d just toss later.