One of the criticisms one hears about Drupal is that it does not include a WYSIWYG editor in the the core distribution.  I've never had much of an opinion about this one way or the other.  I do most of my substantial writing locally and use the old copy and paste technique to get the resulting xHTML that is generated into Drupal. 

For a number of years, I used an html editor called HomeSite for generating and testing my web pages and also as the tool for writing articles and blog posts.  It's not a WYSIWYG tool, but I've become quite adept at inserting the xHTML markup as I'm composing text over the years.  My mode of operation has changed recently and this is why: