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An interesting thing about WordPerfect was that most of the keyboard shortcuts were built around the row of function keys at the top of the keyboard, so they we
by _mlbt 2y ago
An interesting thing about WordPerfect was that most of the keyboard shortcuts were built around the row of function keys at the top of the keyboard, so they were difficult to remember, compared to modern keyboard shortcuts. For this reason, nearly every WordPerfect user I knew had a little piece of plastic or laminated paper that they placed above the row of function keys that listed all of the keyboard shortcuts on it to help them remember.
- mbreese 2y agoThe shortcut strip came in the box! And it was all based on F1-F12 and modifier keys alt/ctrl/shift. It was a complete pain to learn, but once you knew a few key ones (F10 was save?), it was very fast to work with. I wasn't very old, but I remember having the same kind of muscle memory then with WP5.0/5.1 that I do now with vim. Autosave wasn't a thing, so hitting F10 often was just done out of habit. But, by far the best part was that you could reveal all of the formatting codes, so you could see exactly how something was styled. It was much like editing HTML by hand, and easier to figure out how something was styled than with almost any WYSIWYG. Here’s a photo of what it looked like: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1aemcxc/80s_word_perfect_keyboard_shortcut_keyboard/?rdt=54094 https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1aemcxc/80s_word_perf...
- psunavy03 2y agoLosing Reveal Codes was the worst part of Microsoft forcing Word down everyone's throat. Word positively sucks in comparison to this day. No, the little "paragraph" icon isn't enough. Reveal Codes showed you in granular form what was going on so you could fix what was borked, instead of ping-ponging back and forth in AutoComplete hell. And it wasn't just on the DOS version. WordPerfect for Windows has/had it too along with the modern WYSIWYG UI.
- dogman1050 2y agoI don't remember the details, but the function key shortcuts changed enough between WP4.2 and 5.1 to slow me down. May have been the first time I grumbled about a SW update breaking my workflow. Some things never change.
- kstrauser 2y agoReveal Codes made learning HTML so easy for me back in the day. It was the same idea, just different codes.
- bluGill 2y agoThe function keys were no more difficult to use than any other key shortcut. However since keyboards had that space they put the chart there and so could find the less commonly used commands. Everyone quickly learned which key was save, but there were many many others that they didn't use and so they didn't know - but if they wanted it they could look at the chart and find it. GUIs are more discoverable (when done well), but DOS didn't really have a GUI option, so this was a second best. VI and emacs users sometimes print shortcut charts as well.
- _mlbt 2y agoMost modern keyboard shortcuts are mnemonic such as Ctrl-S for Save, which makes them easier to remember than function keys.
- snotrockets 2y agoAssuming you speak English.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Rygian 2y agoAt some point OpenOffice decided that the shortcut to save was Ctrl-G because my locale was set to Spanish ("guardar").
- selcuka 2y agoMight be true for saving, but there are far too many shortcuts. What makes it easier to remember that Ctrl+X is cut and Ctrl+V is paste?
- mauvehaus 2y agoCtrl-X for cut because scissors form an 'x' if you squint hard enough?
- brudgers 2y agoWordPerfect shipped with printed templates/overlays and a wonderful printed manual. There weren’t any standard key combinations yet…except maybe Wordstar?… because word processors still had very very low adoption and many many users spent all day in WordPerfect so there was a lot of muscle memory. Back then software was optimized for expertise not casual use…and priced accordingly. WordPerfect was about four hundred 1980’s dollars a seat, not 99p in an app store.