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WordTsar – A Wordstar clone
- dangoljames 8y agoHrm, really cool but what is the licensing?
- mikestew 8y agoI dunno, what is the default license when there is no license? I made a good faith effort to find one, including downloading and running, hoping for a Help/About. Nope, no license. Not that it stands a chance of being a daily driver for me. I appreciate the effort put into it, but it is way rough.
- slededit 8y agoIf there is no license you have no rights to the software. If they are offering it for download there is probably an implied license to use the software but certainly not to modify or distribute it.
- Scarblac 8y agoAs far as I understand, the FSF's stance has always been that copyright law does not cover use of a piece of software you have in your possession, and they have done a lot of thinking on the subject. You can use the copy you downloaded, no license needed. Modification, distribution, making it part of another larger work -- you need a license for those.
- tinus_hn 8y agoYou can’t run the program without making a copy into memory. That is the theory upon which running software without a license is a copyright violation.
- wahern 8y agoThe FSF certainly has well considered opinions, but their opinions are in many respects outside the mainstream. People, even lawyers, often use reductio ad absurdum to argue that some behavior isn't infringing. In a famous draft opinion in the Sony v. Betamax Justice Stevens wrote, It would plainly be unconstitutional to prohibit a person from singing a copyrighted song in the shower or jotting down a copyrighted poem he hears on the radio. All the other justices disagreed with Stevens on the second point--it's elementary law that to jot down a poem you hear on the radio is infringement of the reproduction copyright.[1] This sounds absurd (and, well, it is!) but copyrights and patents are a little absurd to begin with. Usually the absurdity of the scope of copyright law is tolerable because of the impossibility of a plaintiff discovering or proving infringement in personal, private use. Other times courts may use Fair Use or other technicalities to avoid absurd outcomes. But many times the absurdity lies and people are penalized. In any event, courts aren't disposed to finding non-infringement. Modern courts have narrowed considerably traditional theories like merger and the idea/expression dichotomy that circumscribed the scope of copyright outright. And it's non partisan. If Ginsburg had her way copyright would see a considerable expansion in scope. (Her daughter is the author of an influential treatise on copyright, which propounds a radically expansive view of copyrights.) [1] I forgot where I read the historical account about all the other justices disagreeing on that specific point. I think it was in one of my treatises.
- JdeBP 8y agoThis is not, in fact, true. * http://jdebp.info./FGA/law-licence-free-softwares.html http://jdebp.info./FGA/law-licence-free-softwares.html
- rusk 8y agoTangentially. Noticed that the domain name ends in a '.' - is this intentionally or a typo? Works fine with or without. Does DNS simply ignore a trailing '.'? Just checking here with "google.com." and indeed it does! Google will rewrite the URL to omit the trailing '.' but other sites apparently do not. "irishtimes.com." for example.
- JdeBP 8y agoThere's an FGA for that, too. (-: * http://jdebp.info./FGA/web-fully-qualified-domain-name.html http://jdebp.info./FGA/web-fully-qualified-domain-name.html
- rusk 8y ago(-: Thank you! Also tangentially, do you do your smiley backwards (like I do) so that Outlook doesn't rewrite them on you?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- slededit 8y agoYea you can modify it locally. But in this context I meant redistributing your modified version a la free software. It's not much fun to play with something and then not show anyone.
- jacobush 8y agoModify, yes. Distribute, no.
- SllX 8y agohttp://wordtsar.ca/license/ http://wordtsar.ca/license/ Undecided, but the source isn’t available yet according to that page.
- Communitivity 8y agoMy dad was a professional writer for decades. He started using a computer to write when the Osborne computer first came out, using Wordstar, and swore by it until he died a few years ago. I too am constantly amazed by how WordStar had many advanced features on a system with no HDD and only two 5.25 floppy disks. It is a nice homage to recreate it, good job. I hope you continue to polish it, and provide a license
- kazinator 8y agoMaybe this can woo Anne Rice? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar#Notable_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar#Notable_users
- mkl 8y agoOr George R. R. Martin, who "still uses the MS-DOS version of WordStar 4.0". I used WordStar briefly at school on (ancient, even then) MS-DOS 2 computers donated by a petrol station whose POS software was burned into the screens. I didn't think much of it - I'd already seen newer software.
- pasbesoin 8y agoI need to hook up my old Okidata so I can use control-character-triggered physical backspacing to put double-quote "unlauts" on top of my vowels. And "B" plus "p" makes a passable ß (well, in a different font). Fun times. By the way, with regard to other comments here about diehard users, I never had more than a passing relationship with WordPerfect 5.1, but I've heard of people who stayed with it for years and years (and years). For them, it was and remained the perfect writing tool.
- larrywright 8y agoI remember hearing that law firms used WordPerfect for years longer than most, because the templates (may not be the right term) for creating legal documents were widely available and it was easier to create the precisely formatted documents in WordPerfect than in Word.
- JdeBP 8y agoYou'll find that this system is still in use even today. GNU roff, for example, in non-UTF-8 locales with a terminal as the output device renders the bullets in bulleted lists as a "+" overstruck by an "o" to give a crossed circle. And the manual systems on the BSDs and on Linux operating systems still use TeleType Model 37 overstriking semantics for boldface and underlining, even though (for starters) GNU grotty has been capable of the more modern (from 1976!) system of specifying character attributes on terminals for decades. * https://sources.debian.org/src/groff/1.22.3-10/tmac/tty.tmac/#L22 https://sources.debian.org/src/groff/1.22.3-10/tmac/tty.tmac... * http://jdebp.info./Proposals/ul-manual-page.html http://jdebp.info./Proposals/ul-manual-page.html * http://jdebp.info./Softwares/nosh/italics-in-manuals.html http://jdebp.info./Softwares/nosh/italics-in-manuals.html
- Lio 8y agoReally want to read about this but the webpage keeps messsing with the scrolling on my phone and reader mode is unavailable. For some reason the webpage keeps scrolling itself vertically. That’s not a useful feature of a web page IMHO. :(
- codetrotter 8y agoIt does on mine as well. After I scroll down and start reading it begins to make small jumps in the opposite direction. Weird.
- wruza 8y agoThat’s carousel or whatever frontend guys name it spinning at the top. Slides with different height. Not a big deal, since it could open a popup, three floating bars and gdpr warning after you explicitly accepted their tracking cookies instead.
- cyberferret 8y agoWordstar was one of those programs back in the 80's that made me wonder how masochistic some computer users would be in order to try and remember all those dot commands and Ctrl keystrokes. The along came WordPerfect and made Wordstar look like UX bliss... For the life of me I can't recall which maniac thought up Shift-F7 (IIRC) as the 'Quit' key for WordPerfect.
- Gibbon1 8y agoWordPerfect document formatting was and is total trash compared to Wordstar's.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoWordperfect was far more powerful than Wordstar, you just had to get used to operating in their strange kinda-sorta-but not really WSYWIG mode; and pull up the codes view to sort out occasional oddities. All in the most unfriendly set of shortcuts and codes imaginable. :) WP had unbeatable table of contents, footnotes and index generation at the time - far better than Wordstar, and Word.
- chx 8y agoTo this day I am utterly lost without Reveal Codes. So lost. Something is happening to this text... but why? Gosh.
- eggy 8y agoDo you mean WYSIWYG? I am not familiar otherwise.
- eggy 8y agoI was genuinely asking since I couldn't find WSYWIG vs WYSIWYG, and thought it might be something else. Oh well...
- Shorel 8y agoI used to live in "show codes" mode, a.k.a. F3 In my opinion it was miles ahead of Wordstar and a bit similar to what is now HTML tags. The macro language of wordperfect 5.1 did let me add auto-correction for common typos. And some other things like: if typing a comma after a space, move the comma to be before the space, and the same for dots. I'm sure wordstar was nice, but for me it was just not as powerful.
- throwawayqdhd 8y agoThis is just a ploy to ensure that George RR Martin doesn't stop writing once the original WordStar stops working!
- andrewf 8y agoAnyone got a link to printed output produced by WordStar? I used it as a young kid on my Dad's computer. I imagine that most "real" users printed the stuff they wrote, but I've never seen an example!
- anilgulecha 8y agoA modern day usage of similar output is the screenplay format. So the output would look something like this: http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/A+Clockwork+Orange.pdf http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/A+Clockwork+Orange.pdf
- wordpressdev 8y agoStarted my word processing with Wordstar (and spreadsheets with Lotus123). Those were the days.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 2038AD 8y agoI managed to misread as Worldstar as in WorldStar Hiphop haha
- firstbabylonian 8y ago> Tsar In the current political and cultural climate, using Russian-themed names for things, even in cutesy and seemingly innocuous ways, is a bit unwise. There are plenty of other good names to choose from, while normalising Russian language and "culture" pretending that it isn't the culture of the aggressor, is dangerous.
- BurnGpuBurn 8y agoBaseless name calling one of the big superpowers "the aggressor" is perhaps even more dangerous, and unwise to say the least. But let's not get political, it's a freaking text editor.
- Freak_NL 8y agoYeah, that kind of derogatory down-playing of another culture reeks of classic cold-war rhetoric. I hope we can do without that type of othering. Also, 'Tsar' is a term that was also used outside of Russia (Bulgaria, Serbia) — never mind that the last Russian 'Tsar' died over a century ago; 1721 even if you follow the Russian naming convention!
- clan 8y agoThe wordplay using Caesar is not as catchy though. On that note we maybe should change the name of the game of Bridge. If so I would like to change the meaning of playing a trump card at the same time. Politics are important. Please let us not trivialize them by such non-issues. The etymology of the words goes much much deeper. "The one who only takes joking for joke and seriously only seriously, he and she have actually taken both of them badly"
- chris_wot 8y agoI'm disappointed they haven't released the sources.
- jkabrg 8y agoWhat's the advantage of Wordstar over: - Word - Emacs/VIM + Markdown + Latex + Pandoc - VScode/Atom + Markdown + Latex + Pandoc - LyX Very cool otherwise.
- jacobush 8y agoI never became used to it, because I never tried really, but IIRC Wordstar has a very smart keyboard layout, really thought out. Word relies on arrow keys, but those are not always in great places on the keyboard. (Otherwise, arrow keys are a fine way to move the cursor around, IMHO.) Also IIRC, you could work with folding and chapters very fast in Wordstar. This is also a benefit vs Word, which is WYSIWYG drivel^H^H^H^H^H^H driven. Emacs/VIM, well... I live and die by Emacs (vim before) but seriously, it's a huge kludge, all of it. I love it to pieces, but it's really a very complex beast. Only bested by Eclipse in beastliness, which is also great for similar reasons Emacs is. You can do anything with both, if you put in a big effort. But it still pays off. VSCode/Atom, only dabbled with these, they seem like Emacs + shiny to me. I respect shiny, but personally, I don't need it. Lyx - tried it a bit. I think the problem for me, was that it promised too much. But if there are problems, you still need to know LaTex and I found myself back in Emacs and googling for LaTex error. Wordstar/Wordtsar - for me those things are for writing books or large documentation. Personally I'd still use Emacs, because I use it for so much else. I'd still FOMO a little bit about the road not taken, but we have to use the time we wisely. (Also, Wordstar = warm fuzzy thoughts about CP/M machines with amber monochrome monitors.)
- gaius 8y agoThe hot new thing this year is “no distraction” modes, running a single app full screen with no notifications or any extraneous widgets. OSX and W10 both have new features for it. I see this as capitalising in that theme
- jacobush 8y agoThis year? WriteRoom came out in 2012.
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- mgkimsal 8y agoScreenshots are showing proportional fonts. Did that come in a later WordStar?
- memorysafety 8y ago> WordTsar 0.1.73.17 released Why do you use a four-component version number?
- realPubkey 8y agoSince the first number is zero, i assume that the additional number is to express something more major than a major-update.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tinus_hn 8y agoClever name but if Wordstar is still owned by someone there is quite a risk of a trademark infringement suit.
- dchest 8y agoAccording to USPTO trademark search, WordStar trademark is dead (cancelled on August 14, 1995). This is US-only, of course.
- Jaruzel 8y agoThe trademark maybe dead but the product is not abandoned, nor has it been released into the public domain. The current owners are Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houghton_Mifflin_Harcourt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houghton_Mifflin_Harcourt I'm sure if they felt like it they could assert their IP rights over any clones or similarly named products.
- dsr_ 8y agoWhat IP rights? The trademark is dead. That's naming. Patents? Seems unlikely. That leaves copyright. It seems unlikely that anyone working on a Wordstar clone is silly enough to have even glanced at the original source, so that's not it. Look-and-feel? Dead issues. And there's no API to copy, not that I believe an API is copyrightable as it is a functional spec. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit can bite me.
- hyloguy 8y agoMy dad, Seymour Rubinstein, created WordStar. It’s amazing to witness this homage to its enduring legacy.
- lloydde 8y agoVery cool! Your comment led me to be interested in finding out a little more about the history. I just enjoyed reading "WordStar of Rob Barnaby and Seymour Rubenstein" https://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Software/Wordstar.html https://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Software/Wordsta... "Barnaby needed four months to code Wordstar on his IMSAI PCS 80/30 computer. This was done in assembler for Intel 8080 from scratch (according to Rubenstein Barnaby was the mad genius of assembly language coding), as Barnaby wrote 137000 lines of bullet-proof assembly language code. Only some 10-percent of Wordmaster code was used." Edit: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 28(4):32-47 · November 2006 -> The Origins of Word Processing Software: 1976−1985 has an interesting section on Wordstar . https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3331079_The_Origins_of_Word_Processing_Software_for_Personal_Computers_1976-1985 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3331079_The_Origins...
- warrenmca 8y agoWow, amazing - I worked for Micropro back in the early 80s - ask him about the Barnaby monitor throwing incident sometime...
- creeble 8y agoIn Sausalito? I worked at Autodesk down the street. I don't remember when Micropro moved to Sausalito, but recall it was near the end of Wordstar's reign. We had a phrase that described the value of the piracy of Wordstar. The "Wordstar Effect" held that the primacy of a file format was a huge boost to revenue even if you only captured 5% of paying customers.
- warrenmca 8y agoFourth St. San Rafael, also Northgate Mall
- ggm 8y agoI recall two things about it: firstly, it did a good job of showing the control-format chars inline, for markup you knew had formatting. Secondly, it consumed an outrageous amount of the screen to show the list of available commands, which was a design 'thing' at the time: p-code UCSD OS did this too, and if you had enough brain cells left from the life of beer at university it felt like this was tractable screen space being eaten in ways you'd rather have back. So as an EMACS/Vi person, it didn't make sense: watching other people be phenomenally productive in it, was a bit of an "oh, ok.. that makes total sense now" moment. The CP/M DOS crossover years, when this predominated were quite interesting. It was also a time of variable speed floppy drives, so they "sang" at you as they chuntered around the disk surface (constant linear velocity sectors == variable radial speed)
- rpiguy 8y agoYou could reduce the screen theft of the menus. It defaulted to a large menu for new users, as you became more proficient you could adjust the "help level" and reclaim the screen.
- ggm 8y agoYes, like spreadsheets, if you came from classic CompSci you could choose to not invest enough time in this stuff to become the expert, and take false-evidence reasoning (like me) to say "toy". I did this, with word* and with the first spreadsheets (my god, just use a pen and paper, or expr or BC) and other solecisms. Maybe others were smarter. I think I excelled at being super-dumb about what I was seeing. The shrunk-header bar, was fine. Actually, a pane of 'what can I do' is now a "thing" Google does, in its web apps. It reminds me of what wartstar was doing!
- ratboy666 8y agoAlways had a soft spot for WordStar. Last version used was WS 3. Took WordTsar for a spin... Fast comments: Seems to be missing N (non-document edit -- used that for editing program source). ^KH (hide block) is ^K> Not sure why (WS 4?). ^JH0 is missing (get rid of help). As are the other help levels. No pure console display. And its big. 16M for GTK3. One file, though, which is very nice. (compare to the original, 81536 bytes). Congradulations! Very nice work
- andrewl 8y agoWordStar was the first word processor I used. I've lived in Vim for years now, but I still have WordStar manuals in the software museum section at the back of my bookcase. I haven't gotten them out in approximately forever: https://i.imgur.com/hFaFdgK.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hFaFdgK.jpg
- LanceH 8y agoNow I just need someone to service my daisywheel printer.
- projectramo 8y agoLike other HN users, I like to do things myself. So when G RR Martin was taking so long to write Winds of Winter, I thought I would just hack a copy myself. And by "hack", I mean I would write it. I had a good sense of the characters, and I knew what I wanted to happen so I started writing. It came out utter rubbish. Wondering why, I realizes I was using Google Docs whereas George Martin used Wordstar. This is all coming together.
- mhd 8y agoThere's also WormStar[1], an expanded wordstar-mode for Emacs. Commit to GitHub 2 years ago, but recommends Emacs 19.34 (which was released in 1996). Personally I was more a Brief guy in my DOS days. [1]: https://github.com/dfr62/wormstar https://github.com/dfr62/wormstar
- jdlyga 8y agoWordTsar = Russian World Star
- jbgreer 8y agoI used WordStar. Thank goodness Turbo Pascal used WordStar keybindings for their commands, too!