Should I use the WYSIWYG or not?

General

WYSIWYG are convenient as they allow seeing what you type and as it goes but they can also be annoying to advanced users as they change your characters as you type, trying to interpret everything as HTML. In Drupal, you may start the FCkEditor with the WYSIWYG ("rich text editor") or a "plain text editor". Before chosing any of those, please note the below

• In ... quickly add a picture on a page, we gave a recipe which is unique to having the WYSIWYG enabled and would not be available in the "plain text" editor. If you plan to use the Image copy-and-paste feature, you will want to have the WYSIWYG enabled ...
• Since the WYSIWYG changes your characters, it is hard to add content like the one explain in this I would like to display code - How to do this? - everytime you would edit the page, the WYSIWYG will ignore the <code> block content and add quotes where there should not be ... It is possible to work around by swithcing back to the plain text editor and fixing the content but it is annoying at best. If you itend to use the <code> feature a lot, you may consider disabling WYSIWYG
• A similar warning (replacement of quote by &quote; where there should not be) has been noted in ... create a cross-reference to another page, a document not easy to create and modify with WYSIWYG on by default.

In short, if you use many of the advanced formatting features of Drupal rather than the quick "Filtered HTML" mode, you may want to start the edit session without the WYSIWYG enabled.

How to change the edit behavior and disable WYSIWYG by default?

You may alter the default behavior (start with WYSIWYG upon edit) as follows:

• Go to your user profile (/STAR/user/XXX)
• Select [Edit]
• You will find a "Rich text editor settings"
  Set default state disabled and can play with the toggle and pop-up settings.
  To have a separate editing window for example, you will need to set toggle to disable and pop-up to enabled.