4 ms·

'Logical, beautiful, perfect' WordStar rises again

• jmclnx 2y ago
  I wonder how close JOE is to WordStar, which I never used. It comes with Slackware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe's_Own_Editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe's_Own_Editor
  • glebd 2y ago
    Pretty close if you start it with `jstar` instead of `joe`
• tivert 2y ago
  > There was no proper archive of WordStar for DOS 7.0 available online, so I decided to create one. I wonder if someone could leak the source code. Googling the original developers listed on the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar) turns up some LinkedIn profiles (which I did not log in to check). I think I've read several stories of old source code getting recovered from a 3.5 floppy someone had in a garage somewhere. There's even a video where the LGR guy scavenged an old PC from a defunct warehouse-like computer repair shop and was able to pull source code from some old game from Sierra Online from it (it was a development machine, and they brought it in for repair in the 80s and never claimed it).
• jklowden 2y ago
  Oh, please. Wordstar is nothing but an insignificant pre-GUI editor with roughly zero useful modern printer drivers. For a comparable but better experience, choose any text editor — emacs, for example — and groff. You get the control-keys of your choice (wordstar should you so choose) and world class typesetting capable of anything, including books.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• flembat 2y ago
  I remember that my Dad wrote himself a clone of at least the wordstar functions that he used, he called it starword and ran it on his BBC micro.
• ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  [dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41169195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41169195