WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) | Hacker News Reader

WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996)

sfwriter.com

152 pointsTomte106 comments

I have a copy of WordStar running on an Franklin Ace 1200 (Apple II+ clone from 1983)... it runs WordStar via a Z80 peripheral card that runs PCPI CP/M while talking to the Apple 6502 to use the rest of the peripherals. So even then people were using workarounds to keep on running WordStar on newer hardware...

I still write letters with it and print them on my dot matrix printer. I certainly wouldn't reach for it over emacs in the modern era, though.

You can't call the Z80 card a 'workaround'! Shameless ingrate...

Well, I suppose it is one of the fastest CP/M computers around... especially because it's the PCPI Applicard (or rather, Franklin's licensed version) instead of the Microsoft Softcard, which means it runs at 6MHz and has its own dedicated 64k of RAM.

I always found it funny how many "plug in computers" existed as extensions back in the day. Lots of Z-80 cards or expansions for the 6502 based machines to run CP/M. The Sidecar and Bridgeboard for Amiga's to run x86 software... PPC cards (both Amiga specific and PCIe cards)..

But we also have crazy new stuff like this[1], which provides an FPGA based emulation platform which can work standalone but which can also plug into a Commodore 64 to use it's peripherals, and emulate a C64 with extra capabilities.

[1] http://www.vesalia.de/e_chameleon.htm

I'm an writer in my spare time, my writing PC is a basic text only FreeBSD install.

I use joe or vim and put everything in git for easy transfer and backup.

For me, I need as little destruction as possible, I even find auto spell check with its red underlining completely destructive when it comes to my flow of thoughts.

I similarly like using Emacs. Window and text, simple as it gets. Thanks to some tinkering, it will spell-check and even do fancy grammar checking if and when I tell it to, but otherwise, it just leaves me be.

You probably mean "distraction" and "distractive", right? Or perhaps that's just a pun flying by my head. :)

It's over of those typos that seems completely right when you're dealing with an unwelcome distraction.

I thought they deliberately used Destruction to emphasise their point.

I was a bit surprised to find no mention of SF author Jerry Pournelle using the Electric Pencil word processor for many years:

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/early-days-of-word...

I do have WordPerfect running on my old DOS PC as well as a CP/M P112 I built:

https://661.org/p112/

Also a Programmers' Word Processor, indirectly: Borland editors (Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, etc.), JOE, and others, took many of the WordStar key combinations... [1]

[1] http://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WordStarFamily

WordStar for word processing, Dbase for database management and Lotus-123 for spread sheets - those were the days.

I love that dBase launched as dBaseII to make it sound like an established product.

As did Oracle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Database#Version_number...

Right, I've read that it was mainly those apps (and Lotus-123 being huge [1] even among them) that made the IBM PC and clones (the PC's we now take for granted, though much more powerful now of course), take off as a product category (i.e. become wildly successful) and sell in the millions (both the hardware and the apps) - right from the early days, the '80's, I mean. IBM released the IBM PC in 1981, I've read, though Apple and others were in the home market from the mid-'70's or so.

[1] I read somewhere long ago that it (spreadsheets, and Lotus may have been the first one) replaced what were also called spreadsheets - physical ones used by accountants in the US - large sheets of paper for doing accounting calculations, with maybe many joined together to get more area. So an innovation like a spreadsheet, where you could simulate such large joined-together sheets by scrolling up/down/left/right, was a boon and a huge productivity aid to them, also the fact that you could edit data in-place without overwriting/strikeout, etc. And of course, formulae and automatic recalculation.

joe (http://joe-editor.sf.net) is inspired by WordStar and gets even closer when started as jstar.

When I started with Linux I used the Zed editor by Sandro Serafini, which used WordStar-like keybindings as well.

Interesting, how it seems to have completely disappeared from the web since then. The two "zed" editors I could find appear unrelated, as is the current "zed" Debian package. Only archive.org seems to still have the original web page

https://web.archive.org/web/20120520234205/http://zed.c3po.i...

If anyone here ever came across a daily IT newsletter called Computergram, you will be glad to know that it was written (and laid oud) using WordStar until at least the mid-90s.

The newsletter had a multicolumn-format, and box-outs. These were arranged by using different margin settings and then running the paper through the printer multiple times. Erk.

^KS

I had a Brother daisywheel printer for my Superbrain, and I didn't like the options for chapter headings in text, as they didn't stand out enough for me. I wanted them to be bolder than normal bold. With the daisywheel I had only one font, not like a matrix printer which had all kind of fonts.

One bold tag around text like (b)example(b) made the printer retype that text one time. It turned out that (b)(b)(b)example(b)(b)(b) resulted in four times typing "example". This was hammered (literally) into the paper, so on the backside you could see and read the text as well. Using capitals, varying degrees of bold-repetitions, I could get what I wanted.

Ha, good anecdote. This is the same technique that I wrote about in this post, though mine was about Unix man pages:

m, a Unix shell utility to save cleaned-up man pages as text:

https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2017/03/m-unix-shell-utility-to-s...

I used a similar hack to persuade an Epson MX80 printer to produce slashed zeros by sending '0', <backspace> '/'.

> These were arranged by using different margin settings and then running the paper through the printer multiple times. Erk.

Still better than CSS.

I have to wonder if he's ever tried vim. Seems like a lot of the features he likes are in vim as well. I'm sure a lot of this applies to emacs as well.

WordStar is not modal and that's one of the things he appears to like about it. I doubt vim is going to cut it - he seems to be using WordStar 7 under DOS emulation now.

Wouldn't emacs be just as capable, or at least an emacs distro?

It would be (and then some) but then he'd have to learn and heavily customize emacs. He's already found the tool that works for him.

M-x wordstar-mode provides a major mode with WordStar-like key bindings. (I just tried it, although it's been so long since I used wordstar - when I was a kid - that I've forgotten all the keybindings so couldn't work out how to exit emacs)

Right but it's not the same thing, just some (incomplete) keybindings. Wordstar fundamentally deals with attributed text. It knows what pages are. It has a different UI. Etc, etc.

It's Ctrl-K-x, btw.

Agree on the attributed text (though not on the need of it for writing prose), but Emacs also understands the concept of pages (you can insert page breaks at will by using form-feed characters, ^L)

Inserting form feeds is not 'understands the concept of pages'. As to the other thing, I'm not sure 'you don't need that feature' is likely to convince a professional writer/Wordstar user to take up emacs.

Emacs doesn't understand pages at all, it just lets you put in page breaks. But it would let you make a page 500 lines long without comment, or checking, and it won't let you preview "page by page".

Would lyx (http://www.lyx.org/) be a modern day equivalent then?

No no, just 'attributed' where the attributes are things like 'bold', it's not a thing that really focuses on structure like LaTeX. There's nothing particularly magical about Wordstar, it's just an early and popular word processor from the 80s. The fact that there are fiction writers still using it probably says less about Wordstar itself and more about the role of tools in creative writing.

Depends. I use Emacs myself for prose writing and screenplays (in Fountain). It's very doable, and Emacs has many of the same virtues cited for WordStar. However, for someone used to one and not the other, I'm not sure what the benefits to switching would necessarily be, at least for the task of writing prose. There's something to be said for a tool you've spent decades using. At the very least, it's one less thing to think about.

I'd say a cool challenge, if someone were interested in it, would be to devise a 100% compatible (both in file format and interface) WordStar replacement that ran on all the major desktop OSes and had really high-quality text rendering. That would probably be the only way to improve on WordStar for the remaining users.

While WordStars page metaphor actuall is quite interesting. to be fair, a lot is just about an environment that you're really used to. So yes, that could be WordStar, WordPerfect or emacs/vim. Or MS Word (which still has a better outline mode than most alternatives).

I'd doubt that a lot of the authors mentioned in the article switched to WordStar after using something significantly capable for years. So we're mostly looking at a certain age bracket (i.e. age when they adopted computers).

Different professional background would influence that. I've heard that journalists were quite enamored of XyWrite and lawyers really loved (early) WordPerfect. If you're a computer scientist, Emacs might be an option. Vernor Vinge would be an example[1].

Then came the long years where MS Word had an monopoly, but in a few years we'll probably hear wizened writers tell about how they loved early Google Docs (before they added whatever feature they didn't use and which could be turned off, but what still was ideologically too much).

[1]: http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/images/Vinge_s...

I imagine there are probably emacs plugins for this sort of thing, but Wordstar is a word processor. It does spell check, multi-column layout, visible page breaks, bold/underline text, automated table of contents, and so forth.

I can't imagine the plethora of plugins needed to get those things (and the ones I haven't thought of) all working together in some sane way.

He is evangelizing a writing program he has used extensively for 34 years. Don't place your bets on him dropping ship to another program that kinda does the same thing :)

I never used it much as a word processor, but WordStar was my favorite programming editor on CP/M. Of course that was long before the 1996 date of this article! I remember a few friends who also used it for their coding.

Sawyer's article hints at this: "An Interface Designed For Touch Typists".

So now I'm curious: anyone else out there who used WordStar as a programming editor back in the day?

As mentioned here, Borland Turbo Pascal used the Wordstar style of editing. I didn't use other languages as the time.

I wrote some BASIC in nondocument mode, but it was my first computer, and my introduction to IT. (Aye, I'm a youngin who had the IBM PC port).

I used it as such under DOS (wrote 6800, 6809 and 8088 assembly language and C with Microsoft C 4.0).

I wrote this emulator to allow me to use CP/M wordstar in Linux:

https://github.com/jhallen/cpm

Screen I/O just uses the terminal emulator and does not open another window. I'd like to see a DOS emulator that works like this.

DOSEmu at least used to have that mode IIRC

Indeed. Pascal with WordStar on CP/M, running in my father's Osborne 1.

I used Wordmaster for programming editing for as long as I could

George R.R Martin uses WordStar

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/14/george_r_...

Mentioned in the first line of the post:

Many Science Fiction writers — including myself, Roger MacBride Allen, Gerald Brandt, Jeffrey A. Carver, Arthur C. Clarke, David Gerrold, Terence M. Green, James Gunn, Matthew Hughes, Donald Kingsbury, Eric Kotani, Paul Levinson, George R. R. Martin, Vonda McIntyre, Kit Reed, Jennifer Roberson, and Edo van Belkom — continue to use WordStar for DOS as our writing tool of choice.

Still interesting that he still does so ~20 years after the article submitted was written. (Next question: How many of the surviving others mentioned still do?)

I switched to Word around 2004, when I started writing The Plot to Save Socrates.

Sorry, skimmed through and missed his name.

When I use LibreOffice I run:

    xcalib -i -a

It inverts screen colors. To go back to normal, run it again. Never liked bright backgrounds much.

WordStar for DOS with blue or black colors was easier on the eyes than the Windows version.

Great article. My dad swore by WordStar, even as WordPerfect etc came up and got more popular. He was always tremendously productive hammering out his bids; at the time, I didn't get it (I was using the C64 then the Amiga at some point during this). It's great to see the love for WordStar retrospectively, will send this for his enjoyment now.

I use FocusWriter[1]. http://i.imgur.com/uKVODsM.png

It requires a little bit of config as the default appearance is a bit bleh but if I have to do any kind of long form writing I reach for it straight away.

The font I use is "FS Me", it was designed in partnership with Mencap for legibility for people with learning disabilities[2] which doesn't apply to me (though some people might argue otherwise) but I've found it to be incredibly easy on the eye for long periods.

[1] https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/ [2] http://i.imgur.com/uKVODsM.png

Cool, thanks for sharing. I plan on taking it for a spin.

I use Zoho Writer for all my writings. - https://writer.zoho.com

Zoho Writer, is one such word processor which has managed to retain a distraction free writing canvas, while still packed with features, found in a typical word processor.

> wordstar -> turbo pascal

working with wordstar meant the turbo pascal editor was easier to use. [0]

[0] http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/user/userse32.html

WordStar was where I started back in the DOS days. Then WordPerfect, and now Microsoft Word, where I've remained for upwards of 20 years.

That said, I don't do organization for writing projects in Word itself -- for that, I'm using TiddlyWiki (stupid name, GREAT software).

I tried Scrivener briefly, but I found it too closed-ended and cramping of my style to be really worth it.

FocusWriter (also mentioned downthread) is a really nice little app, although it's best for banging stuff out rather than for full workflow. I end up going back to Word simply because of the revision tracking and annotation stuff.

Thinking about WordStar always gets my ire up, not about WordStar but by comparing a word processor that fit on a single 3 1/2" floppy and comparing that to the size of modern word processors that easily eat multiple Mb. I know that they are often adding features to increase audience, but I rarely do anything in the modern software that I couldn't do in WordStar. It seems like such a waste.

I still think Electric Pencil running on a Processor Technology Sol-20 was superior to WordStar, but then again, I owned Newtons back in the day.

Lots of authors vie for early word processor fame... https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/conte... was one I recall liking at the time.

'vi' :-)

What kind of file formats does it use?

I grew up with [Professional Write][1] for DOS, and when I recently purged a bunch of my old floppies I came across some files in its proprietary format that I couldn't open.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfs:Write

Short answer: Several [0].

Personally, I had a copy of WordStar 2000, which was completely incompatible with everything else.

However, most versions of WS used seven bits for ASCII, and one bit for formatting. Destroyed extended ASCII and internationalisation.

But WS went through a few formats in its lifetime.

[0] http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/WordStar

Recently found the review I wrote of WordStar 5 when it came out. https://mansfield-devine.com/speculatrix/2017/03/from-the-ar...

Got so many praises from high school teachers for "typing" my papers, when in fact it was just faster to use WordStar on a 286. Cool article, wish I'd known about the double period note feature!

I'm always a little surprised nobody has re-implemented it (as a full WP, not just a plain text editor) after so often having heard praise of it.

Some have!

WordTsar [0]

Write & Set [1]

[0] http://wordtsar.ca

[1] http://www.writeandset.com/english/indxf.html

WordTsar looks a little dead: the last three posts on the blog are from 2014, and are titled, respectively, "Hacked by GeNErAL", "The Best Online Pharmacy. Buy Cialis Without Prescription – Orders-Cialis.info", and "Alpha 0.51 Released".

Not that WriteAndSet looks better: "Last modified: September 19 2009"

WriteAndSet's screenshots being from OS/2 also doesn't fill me with positive expectations.

Today there is WordPerfect for writer's needs, including great keyboard controls. Sadly, it lost some reputation over the past few years.

Had to memorize the entire list of Wordstar command sequences for school. We were tested on it in the 9th grade.

Just wait until you get a load of Emacs.

Anecdote: Richard Dawkins -- not being happy with Apple Writer that came with the Apple II -- ended up spending a lot of time programming his own word processor [1] which he then used to write one book -- The Blind Watchmaker.

In response to a question, commenting on him writing ten books at the time, Dawkins interjects to say he could have written 20 books if he hadn't taken up computer programming. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DEe4QEuOSw&t=1074 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQp1QaW_onk

This is very relevant to me. I'm a struggling, unpublished novelist with a handful of half finished books and a moderately successful writing app in the windows store, which I use myself. Every time I sit down to write I find myself making notes on how to improve things or sometimes fixing bugs and deploying new versions instead of writing. As a writer, it's probably the worst decision I ever made. As a developer, it's the thing in most proud of (which is also kind of sad since its so very basic)

What is your app called?

It's called Poe, available on the windows store, and there's more info on http://getpoe.com

Written in WinJS. I'm working on v2 at the moment which is a complete rewrite and brings in rich-text and a bunch of other things. Then I'm going to port that to electron to go cross platform.

Yeah then I'll totally write a book

Hey, Constructive Procrastination is a useful thing.

Well, I am sure you could write a nice book on how to write software to write books with.

WOW! I actually remember trying Poe!

Not sure why I stopped?

I was trying to write on my phone as well, so that could have been the reason at the time...

Having a working draft of your books on your phone is great. When you have any down time, you can open it up and write, proof read, rewrite, plan etc...

You've just made my day - discovering someone on HN actually used my app is a nice achievement, even if it didn't take =)

The version I'm working on now is going to be a universal app, available both on Windows 8/10 and on Windows Phone (which I still use myself) and will hopefully have sync between devices using Dropbox or OneDrive.

The end goal is to have it syncing across devices, across platforms. I want to be able to outline a document on my phone while out walking, and then have that outline pop up on the desktop the next time I use it, either on Windows, Mac or Linux

> You've just made my day - discovering someone on HN actually used my app is a nice achievement, even if it didn't take =)

Glad to read that :)

> The end goal...

End goal sounds AWESOME.

Microsoft's decision to provide cut down versions of their office suite on mobile would have me a lot more interested in Poe.

Given Microsoft's purchase of Xamarin it might be a lot easier to port to Android and iOS.

I did almost exactly the same thing! And yeah, it's the app I'm most proud of, and for which I have the most users --- some of them disturbingly enthusiastic, too.

What's yours called? We should form a club! I suppose every developer of writing software must start out as a writer.

WordGrinder --- http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/.

I actually wasn't thinking of WordStar when I wrote it, because I've never used WordStar; I was thinking of Word 5 for DOS (the last great Microsoft application), and also InterWord for the BBC Micro.

Its main distinguishing feature is that it'll run in a terminal (although it also has raw Xlib and Windows support). It started out at about 6000 loc, written in C and Lua, but has been slowly creeping up. The biggest bit of code is, I think, the Windows GDI front-end, which is a bit horrifying.

I love the idea of a command line based writing app, I'm going to try it out

I always get frustrated with the tools for writing.

I like using details in my writing, little things like specific symbols around print numbers, or being able to ensure a particular event takes place on a certain page number...

But producing the end files is hell. Some printers take the edge of the page in their own files, the EPUB spec is excruciating at times, without full support in any reader, mobi is a worse thing because it's so proprietary.

I've extended Markdown, reStructured Text and Scribble in pursuit of WYSIWYM, and written four or five build tools.

But I still feel like writing in the modern world for modern devices is like slowly drowning.

Being both a programmer and a writer is a curse.

> or being able to ensure a particular event takes place on a certain page number...

I find your level of organisation intimidating

Don't you always want a towel reference on page 42?

Sometimes it makes sense, when you have symbols and stuff. Buried meanings are great little nods to the audience... But not many people would notice if it got pushed to page 43.

> Don't you always want a towel reference on page 42?

Well NOW I do...

Mathew Butterick also wrote a publishing system so that he could write books:

http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/

> Being both a programmer and a writer is a curse.

So true. You have the "know how" to scratch the itch.

Microsoft Word ended up being the software I used in the end. It provided the least amount of friction for the full life cycle.

Have you looked at LaTeX? I think it might handle at least some of that.

Almost everything. I generally compile to LaTeX, but I don't like working directly in the syntax, I don't know the syntax well enough to get into the flow of writing.

Ah, OK.

I too used a handful of different programs while writing my book (including emacs) and ALMOST wrote my own software too, as there was nothing that "just worked" the way I wanted.

In the end, I looked at what was the easiest way to get it published onto Kindle and stuck with that. This ended up being Microsoft Word.

On a side note, have you had your drafts proof read by anyone? Getting feedback on your writing can help you get to the next draft. Keep doing this process until you publish.

> On a side note, have you had your drafts proof read by anyone? Getting feedback on your writing can help you get to the next draft. Keep doing this process until you publish.

I've had them read by friends, but not professionally. Might take the plunge this year

Alpha smart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart

My middle school had these, and a typing course. None of our words-per-minute scores improved so much as an iota until Christmas break, when we all started using instant messengers at home. Our teacher was flabbergasted that AIM did more to improve out typing habits than a semester's worth of instruction.

We also used them to make sideways ASCII art that you had to scroll through. Things like city skylines and battle scenes.

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