4 ms·
Wordstar was genuinely good. It is a strange accident of history that WordPerfect and lotus and Microsoft supplanted it so easily.
by hapless 6y ago
Wordstar was genuinely good. It is a strange accident of history that WordPerfect and lotus and Microsoft supplanted it so easily.
- flomo 6y agoFor a TUI program Wordstar seemed much more accessible than WordPerfect. But I guess WP was more aimed at professional secretaries and typists, and people with offbrand printers. When I was first messing around with Linux, I was (pleasantly) surprised when a WordStar clone popped-up instead of vi. Googling says it was called joe editor.
- morganvachon 6y ago> joe editor JOE is one of the most versatile TUI editors out there. It can emulate not only Wordstar, but Pico/nano, and Emacs. It has full UTF-8 support and can display pretty much any character in any written language. These days I just use nano for simple, quick command line editing, but my writing machine (2000 era Dell Latitude CPx with Slackware) has JOE for long-form writing in Wordstar mode. Like the article author there's no need for internet or other distractions, just boot to terminal, log in, open JOE, and start writing on the fantastic keyboard.
- vijucat 6y agoWoah, it's just 108k on Cygwin. Amazing.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoI left nano behind when micro became mature. Now it is in the Ubuntu repos.