User blog comment:Sarah Manley/Updates to the Editor Redesign/@comment-1091639-20110628065847

At first I was skeptical about the editor update, but with all the bugfixes (and hopefully more to follow) I'm starting to like the idea. This might be also an idea for you to consider:

Some users, like me, who have chosen to disable the RTE in Special:Preferences would sometimes like to see how the edited article looks like in RTE (if it's not too confusing for RTE users and simple enough for everyone to edit). Unfortunately this requires going to Preferences and switching the RTE on, checking the article, going to Preferences and switching RTE off = too much clicking. On the other hand, having RTE always switched on requires going to source mode every time an article gets edited = too much clicking.

The solution would be - instead of having a "Enable Rich Text Editor" button, make a "Preferred Editor" option, which would allow the user to chose whether they want source mode or the RTE loaded on start when editing an article while keeping the option to toggle between the two in the editor itself.

Earlier, users with RTE disabled were actually using a different (I assume the basic MW) editor than the users with RTE enabled editing in 'source mode'. But when the interface update will roll out globally, both groups of users will use the custom Wikia interface, so the "Enable Rich Text Editor" option will become somewhat obsolete.