I always thought one of the nice concepts that WS did was the presentation of the command menu.
WordStar worked with prefixes, much like Emacs. I think it used ^K and ^Q. But, no matter.
The important thing was that if you hit one of the prefix keys, a menu of all the commands would come up. And it was a non trivial menu. More a panel, full screen width, 8-10 lines long.
However, if you were fast enough, the menu didn’t appear. Or if you hit the second key of the command, it would abort the menu presentation, restore the screen and keep going.
This was important because the displays were slow. It worked on serial terminals, and rendering that menu took quite some time. Of course while it was displaying, and aborting, and restoring the display, it was buffering the keystrokes.
Not a small task on a 2Mhz 8080.
Simply, a lot of work went into this key component of the experience, to keep the interface out of your way, yet novice friendly and responsive on the very slow hardware we had back in the day.
Omg! We have this exact functionality nowadays in emacs with which-key (which incidentally is going to be included as part of core emacs in the next version), so I guess wordstar is where the idea originally comes from! That's so interesting :D
I don't know what the maintainers chose, but honestly, which-key would be an awesome default to have turned on.
It's soooo helpful for discovery and recall of commands (which is a huge problem with such a complicated application as Emacs!) that the fact that which-key was included by default in Spacemacs half a decade ago is a big reason I am as proficient in Emacs as I am today, and I'm sure there are others who feel the same.
It would be very, very useful for new users. Experienced users can turn it off if they don't like it -- much like the menu bars that are on by default in Emacs.
Yeah I suppose. I find M-x describe-bindings works fine when I need help.
Maybe something like "on by default if there's no .emacs" (so likely a new user) but if there is a .emacs then only on if enabled. But that probably has at least as many downsides as up.
I guess I'll just disable it along with the menus and scrollbars as I already do.
where which-key really excels is when you're already halfway through a complicated series of keyboard shortcuts and can't remember the next sequence.
you pause, and the menu pops up to remind you
using describe bindings you have to ctrl-g out of your half entered command, run describe bindings, search for what you wanted to do (without context -- which-key has the context of your half built command and only shows relevant commands, but describe-bindings just shows everything), make note of it, dismiss the documentation buffer, and then repeat the whole command again to try again
much easier to have which-key pop up and remind you of how to continue while you're still in the middle of it, and go away on its own when you continue
if you're really proficient you won't even have to turn it off because it only appears when you pause, so you'll go so fast you never see it
which-key is not a replacement for describe-bindings, it's a contextual tool to surface that information automatically when it's needed and to dismiss it or not display it when it's not
Thanks for the added detail. Guess I'll give it a try. But I really tend to dislike behaviors that kick in when I pause, because I pause for a lot of reasons other than not remembering what comes next. It's why I also tend to disable all forms of auto-complete.
Finally, to come back to the keyboard interface, I think WordStar is the least modal word processor I have ever used. On long-hand paper, writing and editing are one fluid task: there's no barrier to discourage you from switching between adding new material and modifying existing material. On a typed page, these tasks are quite distinct, especially with non-electronic typewriters. To change a word is a completely different spectrum of activities, and therefore a completely different mindset, from simply adding new words.
The thing is, Microsoft Word (for Dos and then Windows) was actually a big step for this also. The standard Windows/Macintosh arrow-key-and-selection-area interface was huge step up from previous word processing. The thing is that as author says, previous word processors like WordPerfect preserved faithfully and horribly the typed-page-and-whiteout "interface". I wrote a number of college papers in WordPerfect and I found it's "modalism" terrible (though I'm sure some is nostalgic, someone found advantages).
Moreover, the select-copy-paste system is based on a few simple tools that can be grasped without special training and synergize to produce just about any edit effect. Things weren't that easy before and I don't miss that.
One thing I'd mention is that graphic editing (photoshop/GIMP/etc) is still stuck in an interface taken from paper. And that when CorelDraw and Inkscape showed a better interface that also uses a few synergizing tools, other software failed to adopt it. But the pressures on graphics software seems to be different.
>One thing I'd mention is that graphic editing (photoshop/GIMP/etc) is still stuck in an interface taken from paper. And that when CorelDraw and Inkscape showed a better interface that also uses a few synergizing tools, other software failed to adopt it. But the pressures on graphics software seems to be different.
As someone who has only used these applications briefly, I would love to know more about this.
I think the claim is the an interface that revolves a bunch of different tools being applied to the image (e.g. the Lasso, Pencil, Paint, Eraser, etc. tools on the toolbar) is imitating paper. I don't know what the better alternative is.
It depends upon what you are starting with and what you are trying to accomplish. In times past, what you were doing the image editing on also mattered.
Programs like CorelDraw and Inkscape treat anything you draw as an object. If you want to draw a circle, it stores the parameters of the circle (e.g. position, radius, colour) in memory rather than a rasterized version of it. If you want to create a circle that looks like a sphere, you may draw a second circle inside the first circle to serve as the highlight, then connect the circles using a blend to create the gradient effect. If you don't like the position of the highlight, you move the second circle and the blend will be automatically adjusted. If you don't like the colour, you select each circle and adjust the colours. Of course, you don't have to limit yourself to colours. The circle could contain bitmap to end up with a textured sphere. The second circle doesn't have to be a circle either. It could be a crescent shape. I used to create some amazing looking alien planets using these techniques. You don't have to limit yourself to primitive shapes either. Graphics tablets digitize a number of different parameters for strokes. You could create a stroke with the pencil tool, then modify a parameter of that stroke so it looks like it was created by a calligraphy pen or a paint brush.
That description implies an intrinsic limitation: it's greatest utility is in image creation. You could store modifications to a pre-existing raster image in a similar way, but it is not quite as useful. For detailed images, it is also CPU and memory intensive. That's not a huge issue today, but it was a huge issue when people were initially developing the standard image processing techniques.
If you look up the Wikipedia page for WordStar and try to trace who owns the assets now, you find a tall stack of software companies that were acquired by others and eventually it seems to loop.
* WordStar was created by MicroPro International
* They were acquired by SoftKey
* They acquired The Learning Company and took that name
* Then they were acquired by Mattel
* ...which sold the assets to Gores Technology Group
* ...which split into GAME Studios, yet another "The Learning Company", and Broderbund
* ...which was acquired by SoftKey?
Or maybe it was part of one of those Learning Companies that sold its assets to Riverdeep Interactive Learning Limited? I think they're now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Learning Technology.
The Learning Company acquisition by Mattel was one of the worst deals ever. There was strong evidence at the time that the financials for The Learning Company were overstated.
And yet Kevin O'Leary's various opinions on business and political matters are, for some reason, widely reported even to this day.
Something I’ve wondered for about 20 years is why I haven’t heard of any FOSS clones of WordStar or the classic WordPerfect interface? I heard that Unix users traditionally preferred typesetting tools like troff and LaTeX instead of WYSIWYG word processors. Also I don’t know how appealing console-based word processors would be to a younger generation who didn’t grow up using MS-DOS. I was born in 1989; I’ve always wanted to use WordPerfect 5.1 but by the time I needed a word processor, GUI versions of Microsoft Word were already the standard and has remained so since.
The Joe editor has "jstar" where if you invoke the editor as this command it loads the Wordstar keymapping and looks/operates with the WordStar keybindings and screen interface. https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/
I am a fan of Joe Editor and the jstar "mode". Works well for me in SSH/Terminal sessions and where I need a bit more than nano. Also puts me left field of the vim vs emacs debate. :-)
WP5 was a godsend. I once found myself typing up a bunch of military documents to print onto preformatted forms. (Picture filling out an IRS tax form with a typewriter. Similar idea.) Typing was easy. The nitpicky formatting was a pain in the neck.
I was a fast enough typist that I had a little extra time to play with WordPerfect every now and then. I found its macro system and learned it. Then I wrote macros to format a bunch of raw text. Then my workflow was like typing handwritten inputs into the start of a WP doc, pressing a couple keys, then printing the results.
Our goal was to do something like 20 forms per day each. After I shared my macros with my coworkers, we could easily do that many per hour.
My boss told me to STFU and not go crazy with the productivity gains. Turns out I turned all sorts of things in that job, many involving office politics.
I've been meaning to, but can't pull myself away from Scrivener / Manuskript / just plain text files. Has anyone tries out WordTsar lately? It does look really neat. I'm just not sure if I'm ready to trust it with my text yet.
I was sorry to move off of WP5.1 for DOS when Windows became "the standard"; WP for Windows just wasn't the same, nor was Microsoft Word for Windows (which we switched to in any case because that's what clients were all using). The WP5.1 macro facility was very nice; among other things, I'd used it to write a simple Emacs keystroke emulator, which speeded up my writing quite a bit.
Made famous now by George R.R. Martin I suppose. I should load it on my DOS machine to check it out.. I find myself distracted by things when I write so I see it as a nuclear option.
Rereading this for the nth time, what strikes me is the emphasis on the keybindings, and not on the conceptual model of what a document or writing is.
Other editors like Emacs or vi have clear paradigms: in Emacs, everything is a buffer of text, manipulated by Lisp functions, and everything flows from there (eg. a keybinding is just a way to invoke a function); in vi, everything is a keystroke which does an action, and the point is to make a sequence of keystrokes do as many actions as possible (and even the modality is there mostly because there's not enough keys on the keyboard). But WordStar as described seems to have no particular idea: interactions past the typing sound like a grab-bag of features with no unifying concept, bolted on one by one by user demand & implementation ease.
The emphasis is easy typing. One notes that most of the discussions seems to come from fiction writers. Perhaps that is a commentary on the poor support for fiction writing by the tools then - it didn't matter that WordStar didn't offer you much beyond what, say, nano + a lightweight markup format like Markdown offers you. At least it didn't get in your way while typing out your latest medieval action scene or SF space opera. And simply being fast and relatively transparent was enough to make it a winner back then. "It doesn't do much easily or well, but at least the basics are reliable and they are very fast both to type and to see onscreen!" Then adding on more ad hoc features doesn't scale well, while compromising what made it so usable in the first place.
But that also explains why for all the nostalgia, you don't see a modern WordStar making much inroads anywhere. Because you can do better now, even for fiction writers - look at Scrivener, which has been enthusiastically adopted by so many writers. Just looking at the homepage https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview you can see the Scrivener paradigm: hierarchical outlining, rendered more attractive to non-programmer audiences like book writers, with modern affordances, and taking advantage of modern hardware capabilities. What would WordStar have to offer to an author who has learned to use Scrivener? Nothing, really.
My first word processor, back on CP/M. I used a foot pedal for the control key and the key combo only approach is/was much faster than modern GUI word processors. Could do decent layout with it too.
I used WordStar under CP/M, which ran on an Apple II+, via a Z-80 coprocessor card. This also used my 80 column card (an auxiliary display adapter for 80 column text, the built-in hardware being 40 column).
This was mostly elementary school, like 6th and 7th grade. By high school I was on WordPerfect, and when I was introduced to LaTeX at university, that blew me away.
WordStar has troff-like control sequences: commands placed on their own lines beginning with dot, like .op (omit page number).
I wonder whether you could write a troff macro package to typeset WordStar files.
I wrote a ton of Pascal on Concurrent DOS (multiuser CP/M variant) using Wordstar in the 1980s... so today, instead of nano when I need to pull up an editor for some basic terminal editing, I pull up JOE's Wordstar mode (jstar) just for a breath of nostalgia...
Turbo Pascal IDE also supported WordStar keyboard shortcuts which was one of the factors of its popularity, IMHO. You could get along with the editor instantly.
That screenshot looks like some weird post-4.x (aka NewWord) version of wordstar, I think most wordstar users agreed that 3.3 was the definitive version, even if it had many issues that were beyond awkward (the lack of support for directories being the main one)
I used the original WordStar on CP/M-80 and DOS for quite a while; it was truly an excellent product. The key bindings were so influential that they were duplicated by the early Turbo Pascal IDEs; I can still remember typing ^KB/^KK to mark a block of code.
What was cool about Borland's products was that when they developed support for "normal" Windows/Mac-style selection using mouse or shift + arrows, those were treated separately from those blocks marked with KB/KK. So now you had two different types of selections.
That was a superpower that people who watched me code often asked me about, because I could mark a block using KB/KK, then move somewhere else, cut some text, delete it, do ^KV to move the block, then paste what I deleted, and so on. So you had, in a way, two buffers at hand at all times that you could flip between.
It's a feature I've not seen elsewhere. There is a block extension for VSCode, but I remember trying it out and uninstalling it for some reason.
These days, the JOE terminal editor is keeping the WordStar keyboard shortcuts alive.
Not at all the same feature, but more general and powerful, is registers in Vi-based systems. That was the feature that convinced me to learn the Way of Vim.
I get the heaviest use out of "a, "s, "d, and occasionally "f, which spare me having to think about a mnemonic for what I'm copying or cut/pasting. Sometimes I'll put a recurrent pattern in a special buffer, but not often.
Having become accustomed to registers and marks, I would find it exceedingly painful to edit text without having them available. This is a sentiment often voiced by WordStar aficionados as well.
This made me laugh a lot — something I really needed right now, more than I realized. Thank you :)
For the uninitiated: it’s a play on words of people shouting “WORLD STAR!!!” while a viral video is being filmed hoping the video will be featured on a site of the same name. The site and the videos are pretty unpleasant but it is part of internet culture and in no way detracts from StrongBad536’s far more wholesome pun.
It sort of ranks as the same kind of wholesome-silliness based on underlying-darkness as this image, re: a certain turn-of-the-century website whose name included the word “goat” and ended in .cx:
That transformer circuit won't give any clue to those who don't remember hello.jpg (Or was it giver.jpg? I don't remember) but for me it sent me back two decades. I actually found HN during the beta debacle.
I always thought one of the nice concepts that WS did was the presentation of the command menu.
WordStar worked with prefixes, much like Emacs. I think it used ^K and ^Q. But, no matter.
The important thing was that if you hit one of the prefix keys, a menu of all the commands would come up. And it was a non trivial menu. More a panel, full screen width, 8-10 lines long.
However, if you were fast enough, the menu didn’t appear. Or if you hit the second key of the command, it would abort the menu presentation, restore the screen and keep going.
This was important because the displays were slow. It worked on serial terminals, and rendering that menu took quite some time. Of course while it was displaying, and aborting, and restoring the display, it was buffering the keystrokes.
Not a small task on a 2Mhz 8080.
Simply, a lot of work went into this key component of the experience, to keep the interface out of your way, yet novice friendly and responsive on the very slow hardware we had back in the day.
Omg! We have this exact functionality nowadays in emacs with which-key (which incidentally is going to be included as part of core emacs in the next version), so I guess wordstar is where the idea originally comes from! That's so interesting :D
> which incidentally is going to be included as part of core emacs in the next version
Certainly off by default, I hope?
I don't know what the maintainers chose, but honestly, which-key would be an awesome default to have turned on.
It's soooo helpful for discovery and recall of commands (which is a huge problem with such a complicated application as Emacs!) that the fact that which-key was included by default in Spacemacs half a decade ago is a big reason I am as proficient in Emacs as I am today, and I'm sure there are others who feel the same.
It would be very, very useful for new users. Experienced users can turn it off if they don't like it -- much like the menu bars that are on by default in Emacs.
Yeah I suppose. I find M-x describe-bindings works fine when I need help.
Maybe something like "on by default if there's no .emacs" (so likely a new user) but if there is a .emacs then only on if enabled. But that probably has at least as many downsides as up.
I guess I'll just disable it along with the menus and scrollbars as I already do.
where which-key really excels is when you're already halfway through a complicated series of keyboard shortcuts and can't remember the next sequence.
you pause, and the menu pops up to remind you
using describe bindings you have to ctrl-g out of your half entered command, run describe bindings, search for what you wanted to do (without context -- which-key has the context of your half built command and only shows relevant commands, but describe-bindings just shows everything), make note of it, dismiss the documentation buffer, and then repeat the whole command again to try again
much easier to have which-key pop up and remind you of how to continue while you're still in the middle of it, and go away on its own when you continue
if you're really proficient you won't even have to turn it off because it only appears when you pause, so you'll go so fast you never see it
which-key is not a replacement for describe-bindings, it's a contextual tool to surface that information automatically when it's needed and to dismiss it or not display it when it's not
Thanks for the added detail. Guess I'll give it a try. But I really tend to dislike behaviors that kick in when I pause, because I pause for a lot of reasons other than not remembering what comes next. It's why I also tend to disable all forms of auto-complete.
that's fair! I tend to be the opposite and I love that our editor lets us both have it how we like it :D
I use to love WordStar back in the day too, but nowadays I just write everything with Neovim.
Finally, to come back to the keyboard interface, I think WordStar is the least modal word processor I have ever used. On long-hand paper, writing and editing are one fluid task: there's no barrier to discourage you from switching between adding new material and modifying existing material. On a typed page, these tasks are quite distinct, especially with non-electronic typewriters. To change a word is a completely different spectrum of activities, and therefore a completely different mindset, from simply adding new words.
The thing is, Microsoft Word (for Dos and then Windows) was actually a big step for this also. The standard Windows/Macintosh arrow-key-and-selection-area interface was huge step up from previous word processing. The thing is that as author says, previous word processors like WordPerfect preserved faithfully and horribly the typed-page-and-whiteout "interface". I wrote a number of college papers in WordPerfect and I found it's "modalism" terrible (though I'm sure some is nostalgic, someone found advantages).
Moreover, the select-copy-paste system is based on a few simple tools that can be grasped without special training and synergize to produce just about any edit effect. Things weren't that easy before and I don't miss that.
One thing I'd mention is that graphic editing (photoshop/GIMP/etc) is still stuck in an interface taken from paper. And that when CorelDraw and Inkscape showed a better interface that also uses a few synergizing tools, other software failed to adopt it. But the pressures on graphics software seems to be different.
>One thing I'd mention is that graphic editing (photoshop/GIMP/etc) is still stuck in an interface taken from paper. And that when CorelDraw and Inkscape showed a better interface that also uses a few synergizing tools, other software failed to adopt it. But the pressures on graphics software seems to be different.
As someone who has only used these applications briefly, I would love to know more about this.
I think the claim is the an interface that revolves a bunch of different tools being applied to the image (e.g. the Lasso, Pencil, Paint, Eraser, etc. tools on the toolbar) is imitating paper. I don't know what the better alternative is.
It depends upon what you are starting with and what you are trying to accomplish. In times past, what you were doing the image editing on also mattered.
Programs like CorelDraw and Inkscape treat anything you draw as an object. If you want to draw a circle, it stores the parameters of the circle (e.g. position, radius, colour) in memory rather than a rasterized version of it. If you want to create a circle that looks like a sphere, you may draw a second circle inside the first circle to serve as the highlight, then connect the circles using a blend to create the gradient effect. If you don't like the position of the highlight, you move the second circle and the blend will be automatically adjusted. If you don't like the colour, you select each circle and adjust the colours. Of course, you don't have to limit yourself to colours. The circle could contain bitmap to end up with a textured sphere. The second circle doesn't have to be a circle either. It could be a crescent shape. I used to create some amazing looking alien planets using these techniques. You don't have to limit yourself to primitive shapes either. Graphics tablets digitize a number of different parameters for strokes. You could create a stroke with the pencil tool, then modify a parameter of that stroke so it looks like it was created by a calligraphy pen or a paint brush.
That description implies an intrinsic limitation: it's greatest utility is in image creation. You could store modifications to a pre-existing raster image in a similar way, but it is not quite as useful. For detailed images, it is also CPU and memory intensive. That's not a huge issue today, but it was a huge issue when people were initially developing the standard image processing techniques.
Illustrator is functionally identical in this respect, if you're more familiar with the adobe family.
As far as I remember, Inkscape is pretty similar to Illustrator. What do you mean by "synergizing" in Inkscape?
If you look up the Wikipedia page for WordStar and try to trace who owns the assets now, you find a tall stack of software companies that were acquired by others and eventually it seems to loop.
* WordStar was created by MicroPro International
* They were acquired by SoftKey
* They acquired The Learning Company and took that name
* Then they were acquired by Mattel
* ...which sold the assets to Gores Technology Group
* ...which split into GAME Studios, yet another "The Learning Company", and Broderbund
* ...which was acquired by SoftKey?
Or maybe it was part of one of those Learning Companies that sold its assets to Riverdeep Interactive Learning Limited? I think they're now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Learning Technology.
The Learning Company acquisition by Mattel was one of the worst deals ever. There was strong evidence at the time that the financials for The Learning Company were overstated.
And yet Kevin O'Leary's various opinions on business and political matters are, for some reason, widely reported even to this day.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2016/01/26/news/real-and-sh...
Something I’ve wondered for about 20 years is why I haven’t heard of any FOSS clones of WordStar or the classic WordPerfect interface? I heard that Unix users traditionally preferred typesetting tools like troff and LaTeX instead of WYSIWYG word processors. Also I don’t know how appealing console-based word processors would be to a younger generation who didn’t grow up using MS-DOS. I was born in 1989; I’ve always wanted to use WordPerfect 5.1 but by the time I needed a word processor, GUI versions of Microsoft Word were already the standard and has remained so since.
The Joe editor has "jstar" where if you invoke the editor as this command it loads the Wordstar keymapping and looks/operates with the WordStar keybindings and screen interface. https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/
The WordPerfect editor has been ported from an earlier Linux version to an up to date version: https://github.com/taviso/wpunix
I am a fan of Joe Editor and the jstar "mode". Works well for me in SSH/Terminal sessions and where I need a bit more than nano. Also puts me left field of the vim vs emacs debate. :-)
WP5 was a godsend. I once found myself typing up a bunch of military documents to print onto preformatted forms. (Picture filling out an IRS tax form with a typewriter. Similar idea.) Typing was easy. The nitpicky formatting was a pain in the neck.
I was a fast enough typist that I had a little extra time to play with WordPerfect every now and then. I found its macro system and learned it. Then I wrote macros to format a bunch of raw text. Then my workflow was like typing handwritten inputs into the start of a WP doc, pressing a couple keys, then printing the results.
Our goal was to do something like 20 forms per day each. After I shared my macros with my coworkers, we could easily do that many per hour.
My boss told me to STFU and not go crazy with the productivity gains. Turns out I turned all sorts of things in that job, many involving office politics.
There’s this for a WordStar clone…
http://wordtsar.ca/
It’s not a clone, but you can run actual WordPerfect on Linux and Windows with a little effort…
https://mendelson.org/wpdos/unix.html
And of course MS Word for DOS 5.5 is a free (official) download:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/...
I've been meaning to, but can't pull myself away from Scrivener / Manuskript / just plain text files. Has anyone tries out WordTsar lately? It does look really neat. I'm just not sure if I'm ready to trust it with my text yet.
There is always Emacs. I love this talk by Joe Dixit about how he came from things like scrivener to Emacs https://youtu.be/FtieBc3KptU?feature=shared
And within Emacs, there's org-novelist. https://github.com/sympodius/org-novelist/
FWIW, there is a separate category for the derivates in the TextEditors Wiki: https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WordStarFamily
> I’ve always wanted to use WordPerfect 5.1
I was sorry to move off of WP5.1 for DOS when Windows became "the standard"; WP for Windows just wasn't the same, nor was Microsoft Word for Windows (which we switched to in any case because that's what clients were all using). The WP5.1 macro facility was very nice; among other things, I'd used it to write a simple Emacs keystroke emulator, which speeded up my writing quite a bit.
Made famous now by George R.R. Martin I suppose. I should load it on my DOS machine to check it out.. I find myself distracted by things when I write so I see it as a nuclear option.
That said, I'm not sure I'm going to take advice from George R. R. Martin about how to finish and release books.
I get the meme, but the man has written and finished a lot of books.
I recently wrote a CP/M emulator, and I admit I had a warm and fuzzy moment when I successfully got Wordstar to launch.
No need to use old machines with emulation around! My code doesn't run on Windows, sadly, but there are other emulators that are more portable.
Yes, and the DOS machine is standalone, not connected to the internet. See https://slate.com/technology/2014/05/george-r-r-martin-write...
Rereading this for the nth time, what strikes me is the emphasis on the keybindings, and not on the conceptual model of what a document or writing is.
Other editors like Emacs or vi have clear paradigms: in Emacs, everything is a buffer of text, manipulated by Lisp functions, and everything flows from there (eg. a keybinding is just a way to invoke a function); in vi, everything is a keystroke which does an action, and the point is to make a sequence of keystrokes do as many actions as possible (and even the modality is there mostly because there's not enough keys on the keyboard). But WordStar as described seems to have no particular idea: interactions past the typing sound like a grab-bag of features with no unifying concept, bolted on one by one by user demand & implementation ease.
The emphasis is easy typing. One notes that most of the discussions seems to come from fiction writers. Perhaps that is a commentary on the poor support for fiction writing by the tools then - it didn't matter that WordStar didn't offer you much beyond what, say, nano + a lightweight markup format like Markdown offers you. At least it didn't get in your way while typing out your latest medieval action scene or SF space opera. And simply being fast and relatively transparent was enough to make it a winner back then. "It doesn't do much easily or well, but at least the basics are reliable and they are very fast both to type and to see onscreen!" Then adding on more ad hoc features doesn't scale well, while compromising what made it so usable in the first place.
But that also explains why for all the nostalgia, you don't see a modern WordStar making much inroads anywhere. Because you can do better now, even for fiction writers - look at Scrivener, which has been enthusiastically adopted by so many writers. Just looking at the homepage https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview you can see the Scrivener paradigm: hierarchical outlining, rendered more attractive to non-programmer audiences like book writers, with modern affordances, and taking advantage of modern hardware capabilities. What would WordStar have to offer to an author who has learned to use Scrivener? Nothing, really.
My first word processor, back on CP/M. I used a foot pedal for the control key and the key combo only approach is/was much faster than modern GUI word processors. Could do decent layout with it too.
I have the DOS 4 boxed set.
I used WordStar under CP/M, which ran on an Apple II+, via a Z-80 coprocessor card. This also used my 80 column card (an auxiliary display adapter for 80 column text, the built-in hardware being 40 column).
This was mostly elementary school, like 6th and 7th grade. By high school I was on WordPerfect, and when I was introduced to LaTeX at university, that blew me away.
WordStar has troff-like control sequences: commands placed on their own lines beginning with dot, like .op (omit page number).
I wonder whether you could write a troff macro package to typeset WordStar files.
I wrote a ton of Pascal on Concurrent DOS (multiuser CP/M variant) using Wordstar in the 1980s... so today, instead of nano when I need to pull up an editor for some basic terminal editing, I pull up JOE's Wordstar mode (jstar) just for a breath of nostalgia...
Turbo Pascal IDE also supported WordStar keyboard shortcuts which was one of the factors of its popularity, IMHO. You could get along with the editor instantly.
That screenshot looks like some weird post-4.x (aka NewWord) version of wordstar, I think most wordstar users agreed that 3.3 was the definitive version, even if it had many issues that were beyond awkward (the lack of support for directories being the main one)
edit: looks like it's 7.0's UI
I haven’t tried this, but just found it after learning about WordStar.
https://github.com/eric-eisenhart/vscode-wordstar-bindings
This was the first word processor I used. I still have a floppy disk with it but no way to read it.
I used the original WordStar on CP/M-80 and DOS for quite a while; it was truly an excellent product. The key bindings were so influential that they were duplicated by the early Turbo Pascal IDEs; I can still remember typing ^KB/^KK to mark a block of code.
What was cool about Borland's products was that when they developed support for "normal" Windows/Mac-style selection using mouse or shift + arrows, those were treated separately from those blocks marked with KB/KK. So now you had two different types of selections.
That was a superpower that people who watched me code often asked me about, because I could mark a block using KB/KK, then move somewhere else, cut some text, delete it, do ^KV to move the block, then paste what I deleted, and so on. So you had, in a way, two buffers at hand at all times that you could flip between.
It's a feature I've not seen elsewhere. There is a block extension for VSCode, but I remember trying it out and uninstalling it for some reason.
These days, the JOE terminal editor is keeping the WordStar keyboard shortcuts alive.
> It's a feature I've not seen elsewhere.
Not at all the same feature, but more general and powerful, is registers in Vi-based systems. That was the feature that convinced me to learn the Way of Vim.
I get the heaviest use out of "a, "s, "d, and occasionally "f, which spare me having to think about a mnemonic for what I'm copying or cut/pasting. Sometimes I'll put a recurrent pattern in a special buffer, but not often.
Having become accustomed to registers and marks, I would find it exceedingly painful to edit text without having them available. This is a sentiment often voiced by WordStar aficionados as well.
WORD STAR!!!
This made me laugh a lot — something I really needed right now, more than I realized. Thank you :)
For the uninitiated: it’s a play on words of people shouting “WORLD STAR!!!” while a viral video is being filmed hoping the video will be featured on a site of the same name. The site and the videos are pretty unpleasant but it is part of internet culture and in no way detracts from StrongBad536’s far more wholesome pun.
It sort of ranks as the same kind of wholesome-silliness based on underlying-darkness as this image, re: a certain turn-of-the-century website whose name included the word “goat” and ended in .cx:
https://circuitglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ideal-tr...
That transformer circuit won't give any clue to those who don't remember hello.jpg (Or was it giver.jpg? I don't remember) but for me it sent me back two decades. I actually found HN during the beta debacle.
It became such a meme Childish Gambino made a song about it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE56dWF0p-M
*punches you*
Related:
WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092213 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344899 (May 2021)
WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370252 - March 2021 (92 comments)
WordStar: A Writer’s Word Processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898950 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557412 (July 2018 - one for https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights)
WordStar: A writer’s word processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13899238 - March 2017 (1 comment)
WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13850693 - March 2017 (106 comments)
WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272952 - Sept 2014 (5 comments)
Also:
WordStar: Arrogant, Difficult, Powerful (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37891469 - Oct 2023 (69 comments)
WordTsar, a WordStar Clone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344426 - May 2021 (140 comments)
George R.R. Martin Writes Everything in WordStar 4.0 on a DOS Machine (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26695017 - April 2021 (46 comments)
Running WordStar for DOS Under Windows: VDosPlus to the Rescue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370300 - March 2021 (1 comment)
WordTsar – A Wordstar clone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549189 - July 2018 (85 comments)
What ever happened to Wordstar? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185 - July 2016 (169 comments)
Running WordStar under Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8538302 - Oct 2014 (3 comments)
When WordStar Was King (2009) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8277061 - Sept 2014 (8 comments)
George R.R. Martin Writes Everything In WordStar 4.0 On A DOS Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744952 - May 2014 (35 comments)
A Song of DOS and WordStar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732320 - May 2014 (13 comments)
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