I love it but it failed me

I think this may always be the case because it keeps it familiar with the WordPress editing experience however once you learn what gets stripped and what doesn’t this becomes less of an issue.

I try to keep it as minimal as possible maybe text color, adding classes or wrapping text in spans for css or line wrapping control.

Also WordPress respects divs even empty ones for design purposes but of course there is always the chance of later editing in visual mode that could disrupt the order of things. There’s currently no way to guard from that. This used to bug me back in the day but now I just try to avoid code as much as possible in the text mode and prefer to use targeted css selectors to manipulate the few things inside that specific element such as anchors, headings and paragraphs.

Also, have you considered using the html widget Elementor provides? Maybe that wasn’t an option when you first gave it a spin.

@pingram3541 Thanks for the tips. The issue was with pre and code blocks. Certain characters were being stripped even when using the HTML entity. I did indeed try the html widget but the same thing was happening. My code worked in the standard WordPress WYSIWYG editor and in page builder I ended up using.

I’d suggest opening a topic on the github issues area. They have been pretty quick to respond to feature requests.

I recently struggled with this too. I wanted to provide some code snippets on one of my sites but didn’t want to install a plugin to do this even though I know there are plenty out there, just search “syntax” and they’ll come out of the wood works.

What I found is that the html widget renders conveniently, EVERYTHING, well client side stuff anyway, html css, and javascript. So if you want to add a bit of css or js, you can do that and it renders real time in the preview. But what if you don’t want it to actually render?

I simply ended up converting my snippets into html entities, including the wrapping script or style tags which is an important requirement for this to work and of course placed that inside pre / code tags. I had to add a little bit of css to style it just right but got it looking nicely without all the extra syntax formatting fluff of course.

I’m sure this would have been much easier to just let some other plugin handle this via shortcode, converting each line into span tags and syntax formatting as needed, but I didn’t want to have to babysit yet another plugin to later become un-maintained.