The short answer is no, but it's in the works.

MarsEdit features a specialized text editor with many features designed to make blog editing more streamlined and productive. A major benefit of MarsEdit's text-only editor, is you can be confident that your web content is sent to your blog just as you typed it. MarsEdit won't "mess up" your finely crafted HTML.

That said, we recognize the value of offering a WYSIWYG HTML editor, which would allow editing in a more word-processor style. While this feature is not available yet for MarsEdit, many users find the extremely powerful HTML Preview window is better suited to "seeing what you'll get" after you send the post to your blog.

In a future update to MarsEdit, we plan to support both modes of editing: extremely powerful plain-text markup for power-users, and WYSIWYG HTML for novices, or people who just don't want to have to look at HTML tags while they write for their blog.

A compromise that many people find satisfying is to use Markdown to write in MarsEdit, in conjunction with a blog system that converts Markdown to HTML for web display. This approach embodies the idea of using MarsEdit to express your thoughts, while letting your blog system style them for display on the web.

Thanks to the adoption of semi-standardized interfaces for remote editors such as MarsEdit, there's a very good chance that your blog server software will work great with MarsEdit. The best thing to do if you're wondering, is to try simply typing your blog's home page URL into MarsEdit's "Add Weblog" dialog. Most of the time, MarsEdit will automatically pick up your blog's configuration details, and you'll be off and blogging.

In some cases MarsEdit cannot automatically detect the blog's settings. Don't give up yet! A shortcoming of some of the newer blog systems is that they don't support the feature that lets MarsEdit easily auto-detect their configuration information. It's quite likely that your blog will still work with MarsEdit.

If you know the name of your blog server's software, take a look at the built-in MarsEdit Help, and see if your system is listed in the "Getting Started" section. These pages offer tips for how to configure some of the less automated systems, or how to fix a configuration when something goes wrong during auto-detection.

If you can't find any information about your blog system in MarsEdit's help or in the forums, it's a good idea to ask the makers of the blogging software if they support a "standard remote editor API." You'll want to get the configuration information from them needed by MarsEdit, which usually includes an "RPC URL" and a blog ID. You'll also need to know the type of interface the system uses, which is often either "Movable Type" or else "Other MetaWeblog-Compatible".

Finally, if you're not getting any information anywhere, be sure to drop a line in the forums or contact us by email. We can often help find the key to getting you up and running with your favorite system.