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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 duplic

• 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.