As a writer, I still think drafting things from scratch was best done on a 90's era black background PC running WordPerfect.
I guess theoretically it's still possible to do that -- I wonder if anyone makes turnkey systems for that the way some people still specialize in old typewriters.
I still run WordPerfect. No other writing software has come close to making that same experience.
Til Win8.1, I was able to get it running natively with a little bit of effort, but it became too much of a hassle at that point.
Now, I run Win3.1 inside DOSBox, with WordPerfect installed. It's more stable than the my old IBM PC was, so I'm fairly happy, though crashes do still occur. The keymap differences do take some getting used to when swapping between everyday things and WP though: F1->Escape, F3->F1, etc.
Getting files from WP to the rest of the world isn't entirely straight forward, and I've found a lot of the WP->DOCX converters fail with typesetting and other issues, so I just print to PDF now.
> I run Win3.1 inside DOSBox
Out of curiosity: What is the avantage of DOSBox compared to QEMU for your use case?
> The keymap differences do take some getting used to when swapping between everyday things and WP though: F1->Escape, F3->F1, etc.
Can't you just define different mappings in your virtualization tool? (DOSBox)
[1] Except for large institutes like banks, air traffic control, etc. working with huge legacy systems, which is perhaps the other extreme.
> Out of curiosity: What is the avantage of DOSBox compared to QEMU for your use case?
None, for the most part. DOSBox is a little better documented around things that might break.
I chose DOSBox a few years back, because I still had my Windows 3.1 disks, but I didn't have any DOS disks anymore. Which gave me the option of Virtual Machine + FreeDOS, or Dosbox. And FreeDOS was very unstable at the time.
I know lots of publishers for DOS-era software are gone, and so people do tend to choose to pirate if they want to get hold of that sort of thing, but I have and continue to contract to the government for very sensitive areas, so I always have to walk a legal tightrope. So, I can only use my old software.
Thankfully, I've never thrown out my floppy disks. I imaged them all in about '02, being in a country that allows you to transfer your owned data into half a dozen different mediums as you see fit.
I have actually been having some mounting issues with Dosbox recently, so I might think about tearing it down and building a VM with FreeDOS instead sometime soon. (Though thanks to DOS' super simple structure, that doesn't mean reinstalling everything from scratch).
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> Can't you just define different mappings in your virtualization tool? (DOSBox)
You could. But it's just WordPerfect. They decided to ignore the standard, and go with a keymapping that made a little more sense, because of keyboard designs back then. However, I've got a couple dozen programs I use, and I'd rather not have WordPerfect with it's own keymapping and a restart to switch between it and the default. It isn't particularly onerous, just requires a bit of mental task switching.
I've written two novels in WP, so the keymappings are ingrained, I just have to get into the "flow" of things before my mind stops hitting the wrong key.
I feel like I should point out that it even says so in the upper right corner -- and there you can variate between 6 fonts for the website, too.
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/videos/george-r-r-martin...
https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/
It works well for distraction-free writing.
While I’m missing the difficult bits (the case, the battery, the switches and so on — I want to be able to use it as a word processsor, a “home computer” plugged into the TV, and a pure keyboard depending on what switches are flipped!) it works wonderfully for distraction free writing.
Ctrl-Shift-F1, ‘$ wordgrinder’ and away we go! Best part is, I can swap the SD card out to get the data off it without needing network abilities. Think of it like a DIY Freewrite (née Hemingwrite)
So, I gave up on doing it myself, and got a PocketCHIP. (Cost effective, but less exciting).
It's not a terrible piece of kit.
Or some kind of console only Linux live boot.
And i do believe that George R R Martin is (in)famous for using a DOS setup for writing.
That said, i think i have seen a few "distraction free" writing devices pop up on kickstarter. Not sure if any of them reached mass market though.
Oh and btw, there is a font selector for the site in the top right corner.
Aren't those basically rehashed Tandy TRS-80 Model 100's? Those were damned cool devices back in the day.
Note for anyone who tries this out - to get back to your main session, try ctrl+alt+F1 or ctrl+alt+F2
Edit: I've usually been on Macs for the last three years, and I miss that functionality almost daily.
* https://lwn.net/Articles/305047/
* http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/BetterStartup
* https://blogs.gnome.org/halfline/2009/11/28/plymouth-%E2%9F%...
Agree. It's like a smell memory. For me, I'm transported back to playing MINERVGA.