7 ms·

WordStar – A Writer's Word Processor (1990)

142 points by _Microft 2y ago

NikkiA 2y ago
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 2y ago
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.
- _mlbt 2y ago
  There’s this for a WordStar clone… http://wordtsar.ca/ 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 https://mendelson.org/wpdos/unix.html
  - Tallain 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 https://youtu.be/FtieBc3KptU?feature=shared
      - slowmovintarget 2y ago
        And within Emacs, there's org-novelist. https://github.com/sympodius/org-novelist/ https://github.com/sympodius/org-novelist/
  - UncleSlacky 2y ago
    And of course MS Word for DOS 5.5 is a free (official) download: http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/WIN98/EN-US/Wd55_ben.exe http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/...
- shrubble 2y ago
  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/ 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 https://github.com/taviso/wpunix
  - digitalsankhara 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  FWIW, there is a separate category for the derivates in the TextEditors Wiki: https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WordStarFamily https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WordStarFamily
- kstrauser 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Yes, and the DOS machine is standalone, not connected to the internet. See https://slate.com/technology/2014/05/george-r-r-martin-writes-on-dos-based-wordstar-4-0-software-from-the-1980s.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/05/george-r-r-martin-write...
- jandrese 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    I get the meme, but the man has written and finished a lot of books.
- stevekemp 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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-shocking-story-kevin-olearys-business-career https://www.nationalobserver.com/2016/01/26/news/real-and-sh...
Strongbad536 2y ago
WORD STAR!!!
- kragen 2y ago
  *punches you*
- gorgoiler 2y ago
  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-transformer-figure-compressor.jpg https://circuitglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ideal-tr...
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    It became such a meme Childish Gambino made a song about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE56dWF0p-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE56dWF0p-M
astromd 2y ago
I haven’t tried this, but just found it after learning about WordStar. https://github.com/eric-eisenhart/vscode-wordstar-bindings https://github.com/eric-eisenhart/vscode-wordstar-bindings
insane_dreamer 2y ago
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 2y ago
  I have the DOS 4 boxed set.
joe_the_user 2y ago
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 2y ago
  >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 2y ago
    Illustrator is functionally identical in this respect, if you're more familiar with the adobe family.
  - noelwelsh 2y ago
whartung 2y ago
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 2y ago
  I use to love WordStar back in the day too, but nowadays I just write everything with Neovim.
- logicprog 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > which incidentally is going to be included as part of core emacs in the next version Certainly off by default, I hope?
    - dingnuts 2y ago
      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.
garyrob 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
wolandark 2y ago
[dead]
wduquette 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
Related: WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092213 - Dec 2022 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344899 (May 2021) WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370252 - March 2021 (92 comments) WordStar: A Writer’s Word Processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898950 - Sept 2019 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557412 (July 2018 - one for https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights) WordStar: A writer’s word processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13899238 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272952 - Sept 2014 (5 comments) Also: WordStar: Arrogant, Difficult, Powerful (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37891469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37891469 - Oct 2023 (69 comments) WordTsar, a WordStar Clone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344426 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370300 - March 2021 (1 comment) WordTsar – A Wordstar clone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549189 - July 2018 (85 comments) What ever happened to Wordstar? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185 - July 2016 (169 comments) Running WordStar under Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8538302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8538302 - Oct 2014 (3 comments) When WordStar Was King (2009) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8277061 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744952 - May 2014 (35 comments) A Song of DOS and WordStar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732320 - May 2014 (13 comments)
uslic001 2y ago
This was the first word processor I used. I still have a floppy disk with it but no way to read it.
kazinator 2y ago
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.
gwern 2y ago
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 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.

142 points by _Microft 2y ago

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 2y ago

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.

_mlbt 2y ago
There’s this for a WordStar clone… http://wordtsar.ca/ 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 https://mendelson.org/wpdos/unix.html
- Tallain 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 https://youtu.be/FtieBc3KptU?feature=shared
    - slowmovintarget 2y ago
      And within Emacs, there's org-novelist. https://github.com/sympodius/org-novelist/ https://github.com/sympodius/org-novelist/
- UncleSlacky 2y ago
  And of course MS Word for DOS 5.5 is a free (official) download: http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/WIN98/EN-US/Wd55_ben.exe http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/...
shrubble 2y ago
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/ 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 https://github.com/taviso/wpunix
- digitalsankhara 2y ago
  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 2y ago
FWIW, there is a separate category for the derivates in the TextEditors Wiki: https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WordStarFamily https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WordStarFamily
kstrauser 2y ago
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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago

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 2y ago
Yes, and the DOS machine is standalone, not connected to the internet. See https://slate.com/technology/2014/05/george-r-r-martin-writes-on-dos-based-wordstar-4-0-software-from-the-1980s.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/05/george-r-r-martin-write...
jandrese 2y ago
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 2y ago
  I get the meme, but the man has written and finished a lot of books.
stevekemp 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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-shocking-story-kevin-olearys-business-career https://www.nationalobserver.com/2016/01/26/news/real-and-sh...

Strongbad536 2y ago

WORD STAR!!!

kragen 2y ago
*punches you*
gorgoiler 2y ago
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-transformer-figure-compressor.jpg https://circuitglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ideal-tr...
- dotancohen 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  It became such a meme Childish Gambino made a song about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE56dWF0p-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE56dWF0p-M

astromd 2y ago

I haven’t tried this, but just found it after learning about WordStar. https://github.com/eric-eisenhart/vscode-wordstar-bindings https://github.com/eric-eisenhart/vscode-wordstar-bindings

insane_dreamer 2y ago

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 2y ago
I have the DOS 4 boxed set.

joe_the_user 2y ago

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 2y ago
>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 2y ago
  Illustrator is functionally identical in this respect, if you're more familiar with the adobe family.
- noelwelsh 2y ago

whartung 2y ago

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 2y ago
I use to love WordStar back in the day too, but nowadays I just write everything with Neovim.
logicprog 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > which incidentally is going to be included as part of core emacs in the next version Certainly off by default, I hope?
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    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.

garyrob 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.

wolandark 2y ago

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wduquette 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago

Related: WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092213 - Dec 2022 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344899 (May 2021) WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370252 - March 2021 (92 comments) WordStar: A Writer’s Word Processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898950 - Sept 2019 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557412 (July 2018 - one for https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights) WordStar: A writer’s word processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13899238 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272952 - Sept 2014 (5 comments) Also: WordStar: Arrogant, Difficult, Powerful (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37891469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37891469 - Oct 2023 (69 comments) WordTsar, a WordStar Clone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344426 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370300 - March 2021 (1 comment) WordTsar – A Wordstar clone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549189 - July 2018 (85 comments) What ever happened to Wordstar? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185 - July 2016 (169 comments) Running WordStar under Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8538302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8538302 - Oct 2014 (3 comments) When WordStar Was King (2009) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8277061 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744952 - May 2014 (35 comments) A Song of DOS and WordStar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732320 - May 2014 (13 comments)

uslic001 2y ago

This was the first word processor I used. I still have a floppy disk with it but no way to read it.

kazinator 2y ago

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.

gwern 2y ago

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 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.