Wordstar was the word processor that helped sell the personal computer. At one time, it was ubiquitous, and many authors had a hard time giving it up. Some, like George R. R. Martin, apparently are still refusing to give it up. But most of us have moved on. Thanks to an open-source clone, WordTsar, you may not have to. This is a modern interpretation of our old friend.
Maybe this will help The Winds of Winter.
One has to wonder if he hasn’t released the rest of the story because it’s ended in a crap way like the HBO series, and he’s just sitting on it to be released upon his death. 😛 Though I actually expect it’s more along the lines of him fixing a bunch of things that the writers of the HBO show got completely wrong.
Stopped watching GoT when the characters unlocked fast travel. Historical fantasy needs to be grounded or else you get shlock.
One feature I still think wordstar has that’s arguably superior even to modern editors is the way it handled text selection with anchors. They didn’t disappear the moment you make a change, rather you’d set them and clear them explicitly so you could edit text in and around a selection without loosing it.
Wordstar had a difficult learning curve though, at least as I remember it. It could have used more self documenting cues.
I think xtree gold and norton commander, did this well. Then again, as a VI user, I don’t think I’m allowed to accuse wordstar of being difficult to use, haha 🙂
More difficult than Vi or Emacs ?
Kochise,
You know what’s funny, I am so unfamiliar with emacs that I don’t even know if it’s difficult… Is it?
Learning vi over emacs came down to only one reason: vi is ubiquitous. It exists on practically every linux machine in existence be it gnu or even busybox based etc. If I need to ssh into several customer machines throughout the day, there it is ready to go. Even embedded machines like routers use VI, so rather than floundering between multiple editors, I committed to VI without ever having decided that it was a good editor for me. I don’t even like toggling between the editing modes of VI, haha. This made more sense for technical reasons when ansi/vt100 based terminals rules the day. And to be fair VIM introduced many advanced capabilities (although I have to look up how). While one does get used to it, IMHO vi’s mode toggling is worse than the control & alt hotkey modifiers that are used by more modern editors.
About the same, really. WordStar was before word perfect, but peek wordperfect users had these huge templates that attached to the function keys that showed all the macros they could do with the keyboard. Word star was similar, but less complex.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Wow how did I forget about those keyboard templates! I just barely remember it but my parents did have one on the keyboard.
The author is highly critical of legacy word processing, but he does include a partial picture of one of those templates.
https://www.retrothing.com/2006/06/wordperfect_51_.html
Yeah, today most tech folk like us chuckle when a candidate has “Microsoft Office” listed under their skills. But back in the day listing wordperfect meant something. I never used wordperfect much myself.
I learned (part of) the Wordstar key combinations when using Turbo Pascal, since Borland used the same shortcuts in their IDE. Those are so ingrained, that one of the first programs I install in any Linux setup, is the the editor named Joe.
timl,
Borland had great developer tools (compilers, ides, debuggers) that put microsoft’s junk to shame. Having used both microsoft C and assembler, I felt these were bad but most companies ended up with them because microsoft’s dominance mattered more than the quality of their tooling.
No shade to Borland, their tools were great. But honestly in the Borland Turbo days, Microsoft’s offerings were pretty respectable as well. I think Microsoft won over the dev tooling race by having insider access to what was coming and well just straight up hiring the best devs from Borland.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I just found borland’s tools to be more well rounded, whereas ms tools seemed to evolve by way of idiosyncratic quirks getting turned into official features. IMHO masm weird and inconsistent. The result was that even if you knew assembly, you’d have to learn masm specific quirks to be effective with it.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25129743/confusing-brackets-in-masm32
https://riptutorial.com/x86/example/7933/microsoft-assembler—masm
https://riptutorial.com/x86/example/7936/borland-s-turbo-assembler—tasm
Since masm code was a lot more common, borland had to replicate it’s quirks and bugs and even borland developers would have to use them it they wanted to be compatible. So just to be clear when I say I liked tasm, I specifically mean tasm’s ideal mode and not the default compatible mode.
It’s been years since I’ve looked at either, most of my asm experience was actually with nasm, which is closer to tasm and I find nasm quite pleasant to use as well. I haven’t found a debugger I enjoy using quite as much as turbo debugger though. That was such an awesome debugger before it became obsolete.
Another JOE fan here – though I came to it by a different route. Back in the early 2000s, I used the “slrn” Usenet client and ended up settling on JOE as the post editor; IIRC, the fact that it was a bit more “writing oriented” rather than “coding oriented” was why I preferred it. Though I’ve since used it as my default command line editor in Linux systems, and it works just fine for editing code or config files too.
I’ve always been surprised that it was more popular, or not included out of the box on most distros. It seems to occupy that “just right” sweet spot, being more functional/featureful than PICO/NANO, while also having a much lower learning curve than vi or EMACS.
I have never used Wordstar, but it is great that there is a modern interpretation of it. However, I do have fond memories of other word processors and editors such as CygnusEd Pro (Amiga), Ami Pro 3.0 and WordPerfect 3.0 and up. After using Word for many years I got fed up with the stupid bloated upgrades, I started using LibreOffice. I miss WordPerfect and I wonder how good it is in the 2023 version. What word processors are you using today?
I used and liked WordPerfect 5.1 at the time. When I installed it in a DOS emulator a while back, though, I found it difficult to readjust to the function keys and the like. I found a program, SHFTBLOK.EXE, that adds modern block selection with the shift and arrow keys, and made it more usable for me. I’ve heard that WordPerfect today is mainly a niche product for the legal profession. I guess that makes sense, with it having the reveal codes feature that lets you see exactly what’s going on in the document, and the legal profession being keen on getting documents exactly right.
tomchr,
Me too! I was a regular ms office fan and was apprehensive of using open office. Ms excel was legitimately my favorite ms product until microsoft decided to even the playing field by forcing changes that lowered the satisfaction of office among many long term users. Maybe some people didn’t mind as much, but that ribbon nonsense was the end of the line for me. I kept running old versions I liked as long as I could, but ultimately microsoft was very successful in using the network effect to break compatibility with older versions. Since free office had better compatibility, I changed office suites. Today I use libre-office. It has some rough edges but I’ve gotten used to it and plan to continue using it.