Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

Wordstar was one of those programs back in the 80's that made me wonder how masochistic some computer users would be in order to try and remember all those dot commands and Ctrl keystrokes.

The along came WordPerfect and made Wordstar look like UX bliss... For the life of me I can't recall which maniac thought up Shift-F7 (IIRC) as the 'Quit' key for WordPerfect.

View on HN

WordPerfect document formatting was and is total trash compared to Wordstar's.

Wordperfect was far more powerful than Wordstar, you just had to get used to operating in their strange kinda-sorta-but not really WSYWIG mode; and pull up the codes view to sort out occasional oddities. All in the most unfriendly set of shortcuts and codes imaginable. :)

WP had unbeatable table of contents, footnotes and index generation at the time - far better than Wordstar, and Word.

To this day I am utterly lost without Reveal Codes. So lost. Something is happening to this text... but why? Gosh.

Do you mean WYSIWYG? I am not familiar otherwise.

I was genuinely asking since I couldn't find WSYWIG vs WYSIWYG, and thought it might be something else. Oh well...

I used to live in "show codes" mode, a.k.a. F3

In my opinion it was miles ahead of Wordstar and a bit similar to what is now HTML tags.

The macro language of wordperfect 5.1 did let me add auto-correction for common typos.

And some other things like: if typing a comma after a space, move the comma to be before the space, and the same for dots.

I'm sure wordstar was nice, but for me it was just not as powerful.

The point was that those commands used muscle-memory and were conceived so that the majority of editing tasks could be executed with leaving the "home" position

I can still remember a few. ^KQ was quit, ISTR ^KS to save.

These were also used by the ‘joe’ editor, right?

s/were/are/

JOE 4.6 was released just this year.

Still my primary editor on cli.

Function key overlays explain a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com