LessWrong is rolling out a new (experimental) editor.

Why? Our primary motivation for implementing a new editor is to make it easier for us to quickly build new integrations and customizations, particularly various AI-related features, but I also think that we should be able to better improve on the reliability and performance of the editor with lexical (the new one) vs. ckEditor (the current one). Lexical requires/allows us to own the whole stack for collaborative features, which is more overhead on our side, but many previous issues we've had with shared documents getting mysteriously corrupted should be much easier to prevent and debug now that we own the whole stack.

The new editor is currently restricted to users who are opted in to beta features. You can enable that setting under your account settings:

If you want to go back to using the previous default editor for now, you can opt out of experimental features by updating your account settings. You can also switch back to the previous editor on an ad-hoc basis when writing posts by using the editor type picker at the bottom of the post editor:

Any posts/comments/etc you wrote in the meantime will remain editable using whatever editor they were originally written in.

You can in theory convert posts from one editor type to the other by changing the editor type using the editor type picker, though there are some rough edges. Tables in particular will get lost when converting from the current editor to the new editor (though I expect we'll fix this shortly); likely there are other gaps.

The new editor, in addition to the usual toolbars you get from either highlighting content or from clicking on the + button to the left of the editor, also features slash commands as shortcuts for inserting various kinds of custom elements or applying formatting operations:

It also supports some basic markdown auto-conversions, i.e. if you type [link anchor](https://www.linkurl.com) that will autoconvert to a link, and the same is true for basic formatting operations (bolding, italics, strikethrough). Most previous shortcuts remain functional: --- for line breaks, +++ for collapsible sections, etc.

Most collaborative editing features should continue to work, though there are some limitations around what types of suggested edits you can make - making suggested edits related to various custom elements isn't yet supported.

We've broadly tried to maintain feature parity with other existing features (footnotes, collapsible sections, custom embeds, etc). There are some known gaps with table styling and nested elements in block quotes; if something else appears to be missing, that might be a bug or an oversight.

Please report any bugs or unexpected behavior to us, either here or on Intercom!