[HN Gopher] WordStar - A Writer's Word Processor (1990)
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WordStar - A Writer's Word Processor (1990)
Author : _Microft
Score : 131 points
Date : 2024-06-26 21:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sfwriter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sfwriter.com)
| NikkiA wrote:
| 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
| linguae wrote:
| 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.
| dlachausse wrote:
| 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
| Tallain wrote:
| 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.
| bjoli wrote:
| 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
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| And within Emacs, there's org-novelist.
| https://github.com/sympodius/org-novelist/
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| And of course MS Word for DOS 5.5 is a free (official)
| download:
|
| http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/.
| ..
| shrubble wrote:
| 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
| digitalsankhara wrote:
| 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. :-)
| marttt wrote:
| FWIW, there is a separate category for the derivates in the
| TextEditors Wiki: https://texteditors.org/cgi-
| bin/wiki.pl?WordStarFamily
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _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.
| mistyvales wrote:
| 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.
| itazula wrote:
| Yes, and the DOS machine is standalone, not connected to the
| internet. See https://slate.com/technology/2014/05/george-r-r-
| martin-write...
| jandrese wrote:
| That said, I'm not sure I'm going to take advice from George R.
| R. Martin about how to _finish and release books_.
| bzzzt wrote:
| I get the meme, but the man has written and finished a lot of
| books.
| stevekemp wrote:
| 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.
| raldi wrote:
| 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.
| hncommenter13 wrote:
| 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...
| Strongbad536 wrote:
| WORD STAR!!!
| kragen wrote:
| *punches you*
| gorgoiler wrote:
| 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...
| dotancohen wrote:
| 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.
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| It became such a meme Childish Gambino made a song about it
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE56dWF0p-M
| astromd wrote:
| I haven't tried this, but just found it after learning about
| WordStar.
|
| https://github.com/eric-eisenhart/vscode-wordstar-bindings
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 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.
| chasil wrote:
| I have the DOS 4 boxed set.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _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.
| Pwntheon wrote:
| >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.
| cwillu wrote:
| Illustrator is functionally identical in this respect, if
| you're more familiar with the adobe family.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| 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.
| meindnoch wrote:
| As far as I remember, Inkscape is pretty similar to
| Illustrator. What do you mean by "synergizing" in Inkscape?
| whartung wrote:
| 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.
| wyclif wrote:
| I use to love WordStar back in the day too, but nowadays I just
| write everything with Neovim.
| logicprog wrote:
| 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
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > which incidentally is going to be included as part of core
| emacs in the next version
|
| Certainly _off_ by default, I hope?
| dingnuts wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| dingnuts wrote:
| 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
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| dingnuts wrote:
| 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
| garyrob wrote:
| 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...
| sedatk wrote:
| 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.
| wduquette wrote:
| 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.
| atombender wrote:
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| > _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.
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| uslic001 wrote:
| This was the first word processor I used. I still have a floppy
| disk with it but no way to read it.
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