New editor window way too narrow

I think you are failing to see this from a users perspective.

We are doing our work happily with the old editor that always filled the available screen space. It acted like a browser window and would just be whatever size you made the window.

Then you offer an “upgrade” that puts the width of the window in the control of the theme. Something that does NOT happen with a browser. It may limit the horizontal space of what it displays, but it does not make force the window to the narrower.

Even when I am looking at SOURCE CODE in your new editor, it is allowing the theme to dictact the horizontal space of my editing area. I hope you can grasp how crazy and frustrating this is.

There should just be an override. Just a checkbox that says use theme width for the width of the editor or do not.

Thank you for the code. I will look at your code, but no matter how “simple” it is to install, when you are working for clients who pay by the hour and have 60+ sites to work on. It will be hard to convince them that you have to spend all this time on a change that they cannot even see, because they don’t use the back end of the site at all.

Upgrades to WordPress should not force Extra work on us.

2) It is NOT matching the width of ANY of my themes. I have checked it out on about 10 websites yesterday that we upgraded to 5.2. We immediately installed the classic editor.

If your themes have not been updated to have block styles, then I would not expect them to

I think the point here is, if you are not expecting themes to support this yet, why not make the editor full width until the user’s Theme is updated to support block styles? Why limit us to either an unusable thin panel, frustration and dislike for v5 and (mostly likely) installing the Classic Editor and avoiding the ‘amazing’ new editor completely.

Yes- this is super frustrating. There is basically three options:

To write the theme developer and complain
To hack all sites
To install Classic editor on all sites

Same issue here, I’m using “central” theme, I looked everywhere to modify the code to stretch the workable area and allow me see my tables completely, no luck.

This is very frustrating. Please give it another try, and update just to add the option to disable that.

Please.

I am a bit slow coming to this party but having discovered the problem and seen so many people with the same issue I am amazed. Cannot work out whether this is WordPress or theme developers responsibility but it should not be the user’s responsibility to plug the gap for something so obviously deficient, or making the grand assumption that people live their lives on an iPhone shaped screen. At least the classic editor plugin has temporarily saved the day.

@melchoyce, @otto42

I am a user experience professional who manages the WordPress sites for a volunteer-run non-profit organization. I would say that the problem here is with the default behaviour of the block-based editor – that is, what happens when a theme is not set up specifically to work with blocks. As implemented, the default displays a super-narrow window which does not resize no matter how much horizontal space is actually available. This makes many editing tasks, especially ones that are width-dependent such as working with tables or columns, more than just a little frustrating. It would be significantly better for everyone if this default behaviour presented something that, while “wrong” (in that it is not WYSIWYG), is the most functionally usable. Which, in this case, means that the block editor expands to the full width of the editor viewport space (perhaps save for a narrow margin).

Consider that all of the templates that existed prior to this upgrade will not be set up to work with blocks and many of those may never be “fixed”. The existing default behaviour essentially makes the WordPress editing experience absolutely abysmal for almost everyone with a previously existing site right off the bat and will continue to do so until such time as a large number of templates are properly updated.

Thus, my recommendation: Update the block editor to default to “fully expanded” when the current theme doesn’t supply the code that would allow the editor to correctly coordinate in a WYSIWYG manner.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by strawberryjamm. Reason: fix typos

The block editor had been available and announced for over 2 years. Get with the times.