Looking for a Mac HTML WYSIWYG editor

My search for a Mac WYSIWYG HTML editor continues ... I just finished trying Coda, but I don’t like it much more than I like using a text editor like TextMate.

I understand the need for these HTML/text-editing tools when you get down to the nitty-gritty details of HTML editing and you want to work only with the HTML source code, and Coda or TextMate on the Mac are good for that, but ...

A Mac WYSIWYG editor for blog posts

But, for me there are a lot of times when I just want to create stuff in a WYSIWYG environment, just like using a word processor. I want to type my thoughts with thinking about markup, then go back through and mark stuff up later with CODE, PRE, EM, and ANCHOR tags using a simple WYSIWYG editor with a spell-checker. Tables and lists are a little different — I need to declare those ahead of time. That’s it.

Mac WYSIWYG HTML editor features I want

If I was going to write a WYSIWYG editor myself, here’s my wish list of features for an HTML editor. First, the basics:

• A true WYSIWYG editor. I don't want to see any HTML markup. I can use TextMate or vi for the finishing touches.
• I want to make my editor the default HTML editor on the system. Double-click an HTML file and it opens.
• Carriage returns create paragraphs.
• Adding CODE, EM, PRE, H1-H6, and ANCHOR tags is a simple matter of highlighting and clicking a button.
• I can create tables and lists by clicking a button just before I need to create them.
• Integrated spell-checking would be nice.
• Basic copy, paste, search, and undo functionality. (I already have this in my old editor.)

Then there are the niceties:

• Let me switch between WYSIWYG and HTML views.
• Let me edit more than one document at a time.
• Add in my type-ahead, auto-complete editor foo.
• Let me change fonts and colors, and remember those as preferences.
• Same thing with window sizes and locations.
• Let me add div tags, classes, and id's.
• Make the thing a damn joy to use. :)

The answer

Sorry to split this into two articles, but while this article described what I am looking for, it took a while to find a great, free Mac HTML editor. After a *lot* of experimenting I finally found some good choices, which I describe at this link: The best free Mac WYSIWYG HTML Editor I have found.