this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

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If I see a gap between two lines of text, and that gap vanishes when I commit the document to the web or save it to a file, then it's not 'WYSIWYG'. But this has been my experience with 100% of such editors.

I propose a new acronym to replace 'wizzy-wig':

WYSMBWYGIYLBIACWBFRTWNBMCTYSSIYUC

What You See Might Be What You Get if You're Lucky but it Almost Certainly Won't Be For Reasons That Will Never Be Made Clear to You So Suck it Ya Ugly Cunt

Not as pithy, but at least it's accurate.

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[–] JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca 30 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Personally I feel like they're generally pretty good at WYSIWYG. What they're bad at is WYSIWYW (What You See Is What You Want).

After I do a bunch of work in Word and I have a bunch of garbage, when I load that file back I still have the same garbage. If I print it, I get the same garbage. So yeah, I get what I see.

Is that what I want? No, I want not-garbage.

Anyone remember WordPerfect coming out with "reveal codes" and allowing you to basically edit the markup and fix the issues?

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Word was never good with layout. Move one picture or text block on a page for just a tenth of a mm, and it can easily fuck up the whole page layout.

[–] JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 weeks ago

Exactly. You never get what you want, but you certainly get whatever crap you see.

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I don't believe Word ever claimed to be WYSIWYG.

[–] egrets@lemmy.world 7 points 3 weeks ago (13 children)

It certainly has been marketed as one, but regardless, it is one. The commenter you've replied to isn't saying otherwise, they're saying it's difficult to achieve the desired outcome.

[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Fuck me, 3.2mb program size, 1mb RAM to run it.

How in God's name is word now about 1000 times that size and needs 400 times more RAM?

[–] egrets@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

Hey, hey, 16K
What does that get you today?
You need more than that for a letter
Old-school RAMpacks are much better

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[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 3 points 3 weeks ago

Oh, yes it did, from the start.

That was a major marketing point over WordPerfect.

Source: I supported the early versions of office.

[–] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 24 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

PDF is the only format I know of that is truly WYSIWYG, as it's intended for print output. But, even with that, you need to know what you're doing, it's possible to fuck it up.

[–] Paulemeister@feddit.org 12 points 3 weeks ago

Unless the fonts are not embedded and you don't have the right fonts installed

[–] Test_Tickles@lemmy.world 8 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I wouldn't go as far as to call PDF a dumpster fire, but I can tell you that internally it is an absolute unholy mess internally. The fact that you feel like you get consistency out of it 100% comes down to the anal retentive developers who spend insane man hours tweaking the fuck out of their code to get whatever PDF library that they got stuck using from fucking up the image.
The worst part is that Adobe wants PDF to be the one and only format, but also wants to make sure that you have to use their very expensive PDF library to integrate it into your program. So, they constantly fuck with stuff and make changes that break shit. To make it even dumber, their own library doesn't always keep up with their changes, and when you report the bugs they created, they give no fucks about ever fixing the issue unless you are big enough to for them to care.

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 3 points 3 weeks ago

God fuck PDF.

I've hated it from the start in what, 1990-ish?

[–] iglou@programming.dev 1 points 3 weeks ago

I would absolutely call it a dumpster fire. An absolute hell of a format to work with.

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[–] DougPiranha42@lemmy.world 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

After a while I realized that Word (the web app) does not render lines of text in the same position as Word (the desktop app), in the very same file. The former seems to use a pseudo random line spacing.

[–] grandel@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 weeks ago

That sounds like something Microsoft would do. They love inconsistencies.

They probably have a whole team of people ensuring that nothing is consistent.

[–] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 7 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)
[–] austinfloyd@ttrpg.network 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Yes but the html it generated was a monstrosity. If you wanted to edit it again, you better use dreamweaver.

It definitely did not generate clean html lol but it was wysiwyg

[–] yyyesss@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Macromedia. They ran the Internet for a hot minute.

Shockwave, Flash, Dreamweaver, Coldfusion. My how things change.

[–] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I still have my copy of Macromedia Flash 5. Adobe destroyed it, so I made sure to keep my install package.

[–] yyyesss@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm oddly envious 😄 Then I realize I'd have nothing to do with the output and just get little sad.

I still make stuff with it occasionally, but it's now limited (due to the aged tech) to linear video clips. Still fun, though.

[–] allywilson@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 weeks ago

I've just realised I haven't used anything like that in 20 years. Macromedia Dreamweaver, those were the days!

[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 4 points 3 weeks ago

As shitty as Google is, I've been messing about with Google Sites for one project, and I've been quite impressed with its WYSIWYG accuracy.

Your options there are limited (which probably plays into how it's so good), but what it shows you as you build it is pretty much exactly how the website will look when you publish it.

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That's why I refuse to use them. Just use markdown or latex if you want to get fancy with it.

[–] kunaltyagi@programming.dev 2 points 3 weeks ago

These 2 formats literally do not control how you see the content

[–] Maiq@piefed.social 3 points 3 weeks ago

I've made a few apps with wxFormbuilder and they were wysiwyg.

[–] blackbeans@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 weeks ago

It sounds like you are only talking about html.

Delphi VB6 C# Winforms Qt

These wysiwyg editors usually worked/work without issues.

[–] Hawke@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

Gimme that WYSIWYM, LyX.

[–] Hayduke@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

Shame you never had the misfortune of having to use NetObjects Fusion. Tables nested like an oversized fractal matryoshka doll.

[–] thisbenzingring@lemmy.today 2 points 3 weeks ago

there was a good HTML editor back in the day called homesite, I made a very popular counterstrike site with it

I'm fond of WYSISWYG (what you see is sorta what you get).

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

Try VisualEditor on e.g. Wikipedia. You notice idiosynchrasies if you're doing something specific or are pretty experienced, but overall, the difference between the editor and the preview (fully rendered page) is trivial unless you're messing around with a few specific elements (even then, a quick 'Preview' fills in this gap).

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I've used WYSIWYG editors for web pages in the late 90s, early 2000s and they did exactly what they claimed to do. 🤷‍♂️

Also: Klik n Play and The Games Factory were great WYSIWYG game engines that basically were doing what UE5 does with the logic side of things (the flow editor thing where you don't need to actually write code) way the hell back in 1994.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 1 points 3 weeks ago

I came to say I feel like word processors did what I wanted at one point and then just sorta stopped.

[–] Hisse@programming.dev 1 points 3 weeks ago
[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

WYSIMOLWIG was coined decades ago.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago
[–] realitista@lemmus.org 1 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Do they even make them anymore? Last one I used which claimed to be WYSIWYG was Wordsworth on Amiga.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

they're a huge part of CMSs and enterprise tooling for documentation or support.

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 2 points 3 weeks ago

Huh? They're the standard these days.

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 1 points 3 weeks ago
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