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A potential fourth option for free as in beer WordPerfect if you're comfortable with Apple II/Apple IIGS emulation. https://gswv.apple2.org.za/a2zine/Sel/WordP

A potential fourth option for free as in beer WordPerfect if you're comfortable with Apple II/Apple IIGS emulation. https://gswv.apple2.org.za/a2zine/Sel/WordPerfectPD.html https://gswv.apple2.org.za/a2zine/Sel/WordPerfectPD.html (II/GS WordPerfect homepage) https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.apple2/c/LFkDFMYo_LQ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.apple2/c/LFkDFMYo_LQ (original release announcement) https://www.callapple.org/vintage-apple-computers/apple-iigs/wordperfect-2-21a-for-the-apple-iigs-updated/ https://www.callapple.org/vintage-apple-computers/apple-iigs... (Y2K patched version) n.b. since this is marked as "dedicated to the public domain" on the release website, I wonder whether it would be legally permissible to disassemble these versions, produce listings, and use them to produce a FOSS cross platform descendant (keeping in mind the usual issues around trademark law)

lproven 4y ago
OK, that's good to know! Also good on SSI/WordPerfect Corp/Corel for putting old releases out there for free. In case anyone read my Register story on this: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_for_linux/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_... ... a good point was made in the comments: Borland's Sprint had a very good emulation of the WordPerfect UI, as it also did of WordStar, MS Word, and others. Sadly for Borland, its amazing emulate-any-other-UI feature came out just around the same time that CUA came along and forced all the DOS apps to harmonize their UIs onto a common standard. The other killer feature of Sprint was the continuous background saving -- also foxed by DOS getting disk-caching as standard right around the same time. Saying that, it remains an important app. AIUI underneath, Sprint was based on an EMACS clone. Mark of the Unicorn -- still trading, remarkably -- wrote MINCE (MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs) and the separate SCRIBBLE text formatter. MINCE + Scribble evolved into PerfectWriter. That did quite well in its day; I tried it on a BBC Micro with a Torch Z80 2nd processor. PerfectWriter evolved into FinalWord, again quite a success in its day. I've read several books written entirely in FinalWord. Borland bought FinalWord 2 and renamed it Sprint. ISTM that if the text-formatting part were outsourced to Pandoc or something, or some monstrous Electron thing, the UI and continuous-save parts of Sprint could be re-implemented in GNU Emacs if someone had the will to do it. ErgoEmacs is a good start on the UI front: forget emulating WordPerfect etc. today. (Maybe provide WordStar keystrokes for the grumpy old gits.) Just put a _good_ CUA UI on Emacs, and give it the ability to handle basic, Markdown-style formatting, and a continuous save and live wordcount feature, and I suspect a lot of people would be interested. But that isn't what the Emacs folks want.

lproven 4y ago

OK, that's good to know! Also good on SSI/WordPerfect Corp/Corel for putting old releases out there for free. In case anyone read my Register story on this: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_for_linux/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_... ... a good point was made in the comments: Borland's Sprint had a very good emulation of the WordPerfect UI, as it also did of WordStar, MS Word, and others. Sadly for Borland, its amazing emulate-any-other-UI feature came out just around the same time that CUA came along and forced all the DOS apps to harmonize their UIs onto a common standard. The other killer feature of Sprint was the continuous background saving -- also foxed by DOS getting disk-caching as standard right around the same time. Saying that, it remains an important app. AIUI underneath, Sprint was based on an EMACS clone. Mark of the Unicorn -- still trading, remarkably -- wrote MINCE (MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs) and the separate SCRIBBLE text formatter. MINCE + Scribble evolved into PerfectWriter. That did quite well in its day; I tried it on a BBC Micro with a Torch Z80 2nd processor. PerfectWriter evolved into FinalWord, again quite a success in its day. I've read several books written entirely in FinalWord. Borland bought FinalWord 2 and renamed it Sprint. ISTM that if the text-formatting part were outsourced to Pandoc or something, or some monstrous Electron thing, the UI and continuous-save parts of Sprint could be re-implemented in GNU Emacs if someone had the will to do it. ErgoEmacs is a good start on the UI front: forget emulating WordPerfect etc. today. (Maybe provide WordStar keystrokes for the grumpy old gits.) Just put a _good_ CUA UI on Emacs, and give it the ability to handle basic, Markdown-style formatting, and a continuous save and live wordcount feature, and I suspect a lot of people would be interested. But that isn't what the Emacs folks want.