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?

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.

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.

Pre-Adobe Dreamweaver.

Gimme that WYSIWYM, LyX.

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).

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.

It sounds like you are only talking about html.

Delphi VB6 C# Winforms Qt

These wysiwyg editors usually worked/work without issues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do they even make them anymore? Last one I used which claimed to be WYSIWYG was Wordsworth on Amiga in the '90s.

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.

WYSIMOLWIG was coined decades ago.

Seamonkey

WYSIAWYG