Gutenberg's Default Width Fails to work with Desktop-based Blog

[TheRealRequnix]

I updated to Gutenberg this evening to write a new review, and was surprised to find the ultra-crazy small edit width (600 pixels or something? What were you guys thinking?) was "static" and cannot be changed except through some custom code. This makes absolutely no sense, and now I can't write blogs that even appear properly on my website (www.requnix.com). The text isn't the issue, it's the WYSIWYG layout aspect of Gutenberg; my blog is 1140x wide - has been for years - now I can't use Gutenberg to properly lay out images, etc.

Also, I don't understand why Header 1 isn't an option in the selection - only H2+. Very strange given I've used H1 for years. I have to now manually put in H1 as HTML. Another thing that makes no sense.

Anyway - something needs to be done about this absurdly small and unacceptable width - Gutenberg is supposed to improve the visual representation of WIP as it relates to publication.

Right now, it's completely broken (and useless) for me. Forcing people to write custom code to address this problem is not good design; at a minimum add some sort of Width-based option that allows people to either customize or inherit the width based on the selected theme.

[kaffeeringe]

Headings structure a document. H1-H6-tags are there to give you six levels of hierarchy. Every tutorial tells you to use H1 only for the title. Even SEO-experts say, it's good for search engines to know, which one is really the title of a document.

I think it's good for WordPress to only support the standard. Maybe you could try and get used to it, and regard it as an improvement to your website?

[kaffeeringe]

It seems, the width of the editor is adjustable. See #8643

https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/handbook/extensibility/theme-support/#changing-the-width-of-the-editor

[kaffeeringe]

You don't have to write CSS to make Gutenberg work - only if you don't like the standard width. And future themes will support custom width for Gutenberg.

I think, the team should discuss to slightly widen the standard width, as it's really narrow. Or maybe it could add a 100%-switch. But I think then it won't be too big a problem for most users.

[chrisvanpatten]

There's discussion about supporting the legacy $content_width variable, which might help with this, being discussed in #5650.

[kaffeeringe]

Nobody is forced to edit any CSS-files. Only if you want to customize more advanced stuff - like with anything else in WordPress.

Usually you don't produce articles for only one width. Themes from the last 3 years are responsive. So the editors width will always be a compromise...

[chrisvanpatten]

Oh and another note - as I mentioned above - my theme is responsive. So Gutenberg is actually restricting my editing by failing to show the proper width of my PC so I can see how the content looks as I'm editing it.

The problem is that Gutenberg has no way to know that. It isn't possible to automatically detect the width of your theme unless the theme explicitly provides that information.

Remember that Gutenberg right now is still just a beta, and is an opt-in plugin (not officially in Core) precisely to give theme developers time to update their themes to be compatible with Gutenberg. I'd strongly recommend you write to your theme's support email and ask them to address this in a theme update on their end. At this point, aside from the possibility of $content_width support (#5650), putting pressure on theme developers to update their themes for Gutenberg compatibility is the best option we all have.

[designsimply]

Thank you for your feedback. Because the current recommendation is for themes to be the place to modify the editor width if needed (#8643 (comment)), I am closing this issue for now but welcome further discussion here and would like to note that while adding a user-facing option to change the editor width is not currently a planned change it can be re-visited at a later time.

[designsimply]

Adding a quick note as a reference point, in my experience, designers and developers often point to readability as a reason for keeping content width not-too-wide and I spotted a comment about that at #1483 (comment). I understand there are exceptions and that it is your preference to use a wider content width compared to that recommendation and just wanted to include it as a point for the discussion in case it is helpful.

[designsimply]

I understand that you are upset and I'm sorry for the trouble! The reason for closing right now is that there are no immediate plans to add a user-facing option to change the editor width at this time and that the option for themes to add support for different widths is available as a workaround. Closing doesn't mean that we cannot re-visit this issue later when it comes up again. I have also added this issue to the Ideas board at https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/projects/8 for consideration.

[timnicholson]

I was pretty astonished at the default editor width being so narrow too. I am a theme developer so of course I can change it, but I do think a lot of users are going to be startled and frustrated. A global user setting for GB seems reasonable, especially if theme developers can set that for the user and perhaps even block them from changing it.

One thing I can tell you is that every single WordPress theme listed on WordPress.org is required to specify a content width in the theme and that has been the case for many years. So I would think at the very least, Gutenberg should use that.

Now in today's responsive world that probably doesn't make a lot of sense because the theme will display different widths with a sidebar or no sidebar, etc. I set my themes to the narrowest "max-width" of a content area when a sidebar is present. In my case, 970px which is certainly better than 640px as a default for the editor.

Any rate, the point is that it's required by all themes and thus could easily be counted on by GB to be set and have GB use that setting (or I suppose for a non-compliant theme, use whatever default you want but probably should be a lot more than 640px wide).

[Zaparl]

Hi! This is also a big problem for me. I just answered same question in other thread so I will post the link here to not repeat the same since I don't know if it is accepted to write the same reply.

#8643 (comment)