Hot on the heels of the launch of our Markdown-based WYSIWYG blog editor, we’re excited to bring you another upgrade to your writing experience at Hashnode: drafts in your sidebar.

While it might sound like a tiny quality-of-life improvement, it’s actually a lot more. You can now access all your drafts right from the blog editor, without leaving your workspace and disrupting your flow. That means fewer clicks to get from one post to another, easier access to your ideas, and quicker publishing.

Drafts close at hand

With your drafts within reach right where you’re writing, you can now refine any of your posts-in-progress whenever inspiration strikes. Polish one draft, move on to another from the hide-away sidebar, and switch back to finish off the first with just a click.

Drafts are the new notes

This big little update to our editor’s interface also opens Hashnode up to becoming a note-taking tool: your journal entries, lecture notes, and side project ideas can all live in the sidebar. And thanks to all the functionality we built into Neptune, you can easily embellish your notes with embeddable content blocks, custom tables, LaTeX expressions, and rich formatting.

Using the new drafts sidebar

Previously, our blog editor’s Publish sidebar on the right housed your three most recent drafts — and you’d have to leave the editor to find the rest on the Your Drafts page. Now, all your drafts can be found in the new sidebar on the left.

Launching the editor by clicking ‘Write’ at the top of your screen in Hashnode will bring you to your last updated draft, so you can resume working right where you left off. If you want to start on a new draft, click the button at the bottom of the left sidebar, or enter hn.new into your browser’s address bar.

You can manage your drafts without leaving the editor — just hit the three-dots button alongside each draft title to copy a link and privately share a preview with someone, preview your draft on your device, or delete it.

Hit the star button along each draft title to pin it to the Favorites section near the top of the sidebar for easy access.

Wait, there’s more!

All these features work with your published articles, as well as scheduled articles, which are displayed in your sidebar below your drafts.

If you’re a prolific writer with a ton of drafts, you’ll be happy to know we’ve also built a brand-new search tool to help you find drafts by their title.

For editors working on a team blog, you can view contributors’ drafts submitted to your publication, review them, and publish them all without leaving the editor.

And if you just want to get back to writing, you can hide the sidebar by clicking the icon near the top left of the editor.

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I hope that this update makes it even easier for you to publish content than before, and helps you be more productive and creative with your writing.

Check out the new drafts sidebar in the Hashnode editor today, and let us know what you think in the comments below, or on Twitter.

Try the new editor now 🚀