There's this quiet assumption in a lot of teams that "writing" should happen somewhere else. Some separate workspace. Some browser tab. Some editor UI designed to hide the machinery. Maybe that works for some people.
But it never worked for us.
We spend most of our waking hours inside an IDE. Zed, Cursor, VS Code, Neovim—pick your flavor. That's our home. That's where we think, debug, rewrite, delete, and try again. So it always felt strange to open a WYSIWYG editor and suddenly pretend the way we work should change just because the output is letters instead of code.
It's not just a workflow thing. It's a mindset thing.
Writing Is Part of Building
At Hyprnote everyone writes and everyone codes. There's no sharp line between the two. Writing lives next to version control, next to the app logic, next to everything else we ship. When you treat writing as something that belongs in the same universe as code, a lot of decisions get simpler.
For example: context switching disappears. I don't have to think, "Okay, now I'm leaving my environment to go write a blog post." I'm already here. I just open a new .mdx file and start typing. Cursor or Zed already knows my shortcuts, my theme, my keybindings, my muscle memory.
It feels natural. It feels honest.
WYSIWYG Tools Hide the Wrong Things
WYSIWYG editors always promise ease. Click here, bold there, drag an image, done. But once you try to do anything slightly unusual, they fall apart.
You start fighting the abstraction.
You want to:
- add a custom callout
- embed a component
- adjust image borders
- write MDX
- leave inline comments for teammates
- control spacing
- make the layout match the rest of the site
Suddenly you're clicking around a UI that was never meant for people who actually care what's happening under the hood. You end up debugging the editor itself.
MDX is just… easier. You write what you mean. You see what you wrote. Nothing forces your hand.
Markdown and MDX Are Not Barriers
A lot of people think Markdown is something you need to "learn." But if you work in tech today, you already know it.
You write README.md files. You write changelogs. You write documentation. Most engineers can write Markdown faster than they can type into a WYSIWYG box.
MDX just extends that. It lets you treat a blog post like a tiny interface:
<figure src="image.jpg" caption="This is how it works" />
<aside type="warning">Remember this part.</aside>
Things that would be impossible—or messy—in a visual editor are trivial when your writing tool is the same as your coding tool.
Content Becomes Code, Which Means It Scales
This brings us to the real reason writing in an IDE is such a superpower: version control. Every blog post, every line, every word is tracked. Reviewed. Diffed. Discussed.
- PRs become editorial workflows.
- Comments become revision history.
- Preview environments become draft URLs.
Everything fits into the same mental model.
You never have to pray that your CMS didn't break something silently. You never have to trust a black box.
And if you ever want to migrate? You move the files. That's it.
No database exports. No weird HTML blocks. No proprietary schemas.
The Downside: WYSIWYG Is Convenient (Until It Isn't)
WYSIWYG editors do have a real advantage: convenience.
- You drag in an image, and it uploads automatically.
- You paste a screenshot, and it appears instantly.
- You never think about storage buckets or public URLs.
For a lot of teams, that convenience becomes muscle memory. It's smooth, fast, and frankly… nice.
But here's the thing: You can get the same convenience without giving up control.
If you're already using GitHub + an object store (Supabase Storage, S3, Cloudflare R2), you can:
- drag-and-drop images directly into GitHub's web editor
- or upload them into your storage bucket
- copy the public URL
- paste it into MDX
It takes seconds. And once you're used to it, it's not meaningfully slower than a WYSIWYG. The difference is that you own the flow and you're not trapped inside a CMS UI.
WYSIWYG gives you convenience by locking you into its environment.
Git + MDX gives you convenience without the lock-in.
No Lock-In, No Surprises
WYSIWYG editors are convenient in the beginning and painful later. They lock you into their structure, their parsing rules, their UI assumptions.
But a folder of .mdx files? That lasts decades.
It will outlive whatever CMS trend comes next.
Your future self will thank you.
Writing Where You Think
For me, writing in an IDE just feels right.
It's quiet. It's fast. It respects your attention.
There's no ceremony. No distractions. Just the ideas you're trying to express and the tools you already know how to use.
Once you experience that kind of writing, it's hard to go back.
This post is Part 1 of our series on building a modern publishing workflow.
Next: Why Our CMS Is GitHub.