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Comment by sandyarmstrong | Hacker News Reader

AbiWord is my favorite word processor. It was so much less bloated than any other graphical option. I wrote pretty much all of my papers in college with it. It reminded me of my previous favorite from my youth: Claris Word.

Glad to see it's still alive. Updating to C++11 should make it a lot more appealing for new contributors.

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I used AbiWord years ago, and do recall it being pretty lean.

I get sort of the same feeling, these days, from Apple's Pages, though I'm not sure whether that's true. (Looking at the copy of it I have sitting around, the application bundle is 418MB, with 344MB of that being taken up by the Resources (icons, UI elements, translation strings) and SharedSupport (themes, templates) folders, leaving the app itself sitting at ~75MB. Not too bad, I suppose.)

One thing I think more people should consider, though, is how much of what they use a word processor for that could really just be accomplished using a rich text editor such as WordPad or TextEdit. Now those are light programs!

(And honestly, limiting yourself to unstructured rich text for the composition stage of a document is probably for the best. It keeps you on task, for one thing. But beyond that, anyone who has only used word-processors is missing out on the extremely natural workflow of separately doing your composition (in a rich text editor) and your document layout (in a desktop publishing program, like Publisher or InDesign) and then taking the finalized rich text and linking it to a text-region-chain on the layout document. It's so much easier to make your document look good when your text isn't changing any more.

I totally agree. I stayed on WordPad with RTF and TXT files for as long as I could. Everything was so lightweight with it also easier to sandbox that sucker and similar editors.

Far as AbiWord, I last put it on my Mom's old laptop because it ran way faster than other Windows 8 stuff she had. She absolutely loved it because it had just what she needed, loaded instantly, and was lightening fast in general.

Yes I composed all my essays in TextEdit in high school.

Apple Pages is a toy. It's missing some pretty basic features like even/odd page margins, and becomes annoyingly slow once you do stuff like tables inside multiple columns. I recently prepared a pretty complex but not very long document using it and the experience was pretty unpleasant.

Also Apple has abandoned it. Last update was 5 months ago.

I wish they'd open source Pages, Numbers and Keynote. They really are decent programs that deserve better than Apple abandoning them.

Of course, Word 5 is still the gold standard, as far as I'm concerned. :)

Yep! Considering Keynote is the best presentation tool-- but it just sits there. I'd kill for the iWork platform to go open source.

A manual typewriter is even better for this. You really lose the temptation to constantly go back and fiddle with what you're writing when fiddling involves hammering through retyping the whole page

Exactly that.

I edited a news-stand magazine for six years using TextEdit. My job was the words, and TextEdit did that fine. When the words were complete, I passed the .rtf over to the designer who made it all look beautiful in InDesign. Word would have provided nothing extra I needed, and a lot of distractions that just get in the way. (I still use TextEdit for my freelance writing work.)

I used it back when OpenOffice was just too slow and bloated to use very well on most computers I owned ~10 years ago and earlier. But through a combination of improved OpenOffice/LibreOffice performance and faster computers, I finally drifted away from AbiWord. For one, I still had to install OpenOffice for PowerPoint type work, so it was there anyway and it usually kept up with MS format compatibility better than AbiWord. I think the last straw for for leaving AbiWord behind completely was the Novell(?) patches that made OpenOffice feel more at home on Linux and stop sticking out like a sore thumb(and I think those were the same patches that led to the LibreOffice fork when Sun/Oracle wouldn't accept them).

They were, under the go-oo.org push.

StarOffice 5.1 run fine on a Pentium 133MHz on Win95. It come from a German company which got bought buy Novell and rebranded and open sourced as OpenOffice 1x.

Comparing StarOffice 5.1 and LibreOffice 4, lottle has changed. Well, the same can be said between Office 97 and Office 2016. The office suits were already feature complete in the late nineties, and conceptional issues still plague us 20 year later, as those programs saw only increamental improvements. While StarOffice was in good shape, OpenOffice was always in more rough shape, but nowadays LibreOffice cares more to deliver a more polished UX.

Star Division was bought by Sun Microsystems (later bought by Oracle). I was there, then.

That's the original reason we have Oracle OpenOffice: Open Office part derived from Sun's OpenOffice; the Oracle part the reason for the split between LibreOffice and OpenOffice. ;-)

Oh, yes I mixed hat up. It was Sun Microsystems.

SuSE/Novell had a license deal with Microsoft. MS sold SuSE Linux and Novell added improved Office format and VBA compatibility to their OpenOffice fork.

IBM forked OpenOffice for their Lotus suite. IBM Lotus Symphony.

Star office 5.1 could run on pretty limited hardware, but honestly it's a stretch to describe it as feature complete. That was the bad old days when I had to boot into windows to get most non coding work done.

Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice

Read the section "Components" incl "Older discontinued components" and "Proprietary components"!

StarOffice up to v5.2 was amazingly feature full and feature complete. Newer StarOffice and OpenOffice/LibreOffice forks lost some functionality and contain incremental improvements.

StarOffice 5.1 come even with its own Windows shell for Win95, that showed the Windows desktop icons, etc. (similar to what IE4 did with Win95, it came with a free shell upgrade, then it looked like Win98)

That's kind of the point though. They threw in lawnmower and a kitchen sink, but the word-processor and spreadsheet were lacking basic features

Worth mentioning Gnumeric, a nice and clean spreadsheet counterpart to AbiWord.

Both part of "Gnome Office" along with a few other applications as native GTK+ office applications. Though I guess it's probably be more of a collection than a well connected suite like MS Office, LibreOffice or even whatever KOffice is called these days.

The GNOME project decided not to be serious with GNOME Office years and years ago.

Imagine if they had put their effort into it though? Almost certainly they would have been at the forefront of desktop options and a good likelihood as a candidate for corporations.

You know it is hard to order people to do something when they aren't paid. Even project like OpenOffice.org that had commercial venture had hardship with funding. Oracle cancelled it, Novell cancelled it, IBM do whatever they want, etc.

All in all, GNOME Office didn't happen. Some bits did, though. AbiWord was always broader than GNOME. And Gnumeric is great IMHO.

And people see the future in the cloud.

Except there was a group of people who did want to do it - Abi was a company at one point! But the Gnome guys decided to deemphasise it - that was the problem.

I was in that group. There is so much that can be done just like that.

And Abi as a company was long gone by that time.

It became clear to me that there isn't any money to be made in desktop FOSS software, as most users either pay for their tools, or end up pirating or using FOSS software if they don't plan to spend any money.

Desktop software just isn't the same as sellling consulting, trainings or SaaS licenses behind browser paywalls that server based software enjoys.

AbiWord reminds me of WriteNow, which was my favorite word processor on 68000 Macs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow

128KB binary. All written in assembly.

"Claris Word" isn't a product. Perhaps you were thinking of MacWrite / MacWrite Pro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacWrite) or ClarisWorks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks)?

I thought ClarisWorks was the suite, and Claris Word was the name for the word processing component? I could be misremembering, of course. I haven't used it in 20 years or so.

But yes, I'm aware of the history of the product.

Nope.

ClarisWord never existed — ClarisWorks was the product. Claris had MacWrite II for a time because they were the software spin-off from Apple, and that was their stand alone word processor offering, not much better than Claris Works, which was one application unlike MS-Office.

So much so that this thread is currently the #1 result on Google for "ClarisWord".

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