Good question. Dreamweaver, BBEdit, or whatever other text editor they are already comfortable with, along with the online editor on Github.
It seems to me that there are some problems with every visual editor, including the RStudio Preview version.
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They don't support all of the features you are using in the code, so you have to drop into code mode to do what you want some of the time, anyway. Take the following code, for example:
("[non modo salutaria exercitia, et adjumenta pietatis, sed etiam *efficacia gratiæ instrumenta*]{lang=la}."
There is no indication in the visual editor that a language code has been set on that text, much less an ability to set it. So I have to switch to code mode to even see whether it is there.
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They will change your code to match their own rules, sometimes breaking things in the process, and sometimes just in a way you don't want.
For example, we decided to use a backslash followed by a space to represent a non-breaking space in our texts for a couple of reasons. First, it's by far the easiest way to explain to a non-technical user how to insert a non-breaking space. Second, it's visually verifiable in every text editor, whereas an actual non-breaking space is sometimes indistinguishable from a regular space. For example, on Github, which is where the "edit" button at the top of the book takes you, non-breaking spaces are indistinguishable both in viewing and editing mode. It sort of makes sense to convert the backslash space
to an actual non-breaking space, since RStudio handles just fine, but this code change is not welcome for us since we need to be able to verify on Github that the code is correct.
Here's another example of code being changed in RStudio Preview. Our original code:
"*[Præstat* igitur vere Deus quicquid signis promittit ac figurat; nec effectu suo carent signa, ut verax et fidelis probetur eorum Author]{lang=la}").—*Comment. in* Gal.
Perhaps, ideally the first "*" should be inside the bracket, but it works fine as is. Switching to the visual editor in RStudio changes it to the following, which is broken:
"[*Præstat\* igitur vere Deus quicquid signis promittit ac figurat; nec effectu suo carent signa, ut verax et fidelis probetur eorum Author*]{lang="la"}*").---*Comment. in\* Gal.
We also settled on a naming convention for footnotes, but RStudio renames them all according to its own convention. We could switch to that naming convention, but then anybody editing outside of RStudio is going to have a much harder time working on footnotes.
Given these sorts of problems, when the new version of RStudio comes out, I will have to be very careful to not open any of our files in the visual editor mode.
Leaving aside the visual editor, though, our workflow is organized around Github and Travis CI, and I keep running into discrepancies between how things work locally vs on Travis. Thus, working in RStudio where you can build the book locally can actually become a liability since the built book might not be exactly what you are expecting when you push your changes to Github and it gets rebuilt on Travis. It is better in my experience to just push your changes and verify on the actual build in a couple of minutes.
Finally, RStudio cannot just be downloaded and run. You have to first download R, and install that, then you can install RStudio. But that almost certainly still won't allow you to build books locally without error. You'll probably be missing a font we use, and you'll have to download and install some LaTeX package, which probably means installing Brew... Or you could just git clone the project and edit the files in whatever you already have.
P.S. It's really disconcerting and a bit concerning to me that https://rstudio.github.io/visual-markdown-editing/ does not use bookdown. I'd really love to see you guys dogfood that, because some of the issues it solves, such as search working on mobile, make me very jealous.