George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels, he saves his work on floppy disks. Of course, he has a second computer for email and web browsing.
When I was first messing around with Linux, I was (pleasantly) surprised when a WordStar clone popped-up instead of vi. Googling says it was called joe editor.
JOE is one of the most versatile TUI editors out there. It can emulate not only Wordstar, but Pico/nano, and Emacs. It has full UTF-8 support and can display pretty much any character in any written language.
These days I just use nano for simple, quick command line editing, but my writing machine (2000 era Dell Latitude CPx with Slackware) has JOE for long-form writing in Wordstar mode. Like the article author there's no need for internet or other distractions, just boot to terminal, log in, open JOE, and start writing on the fantastic keyboard.
Still have painful memories of using Fastback, a DOS based backup software. Sitting there feeding floppies into a drive. Stacks of floppies. Twice. Praying the data would restore.
Part of my innovative file sharing solution, aka SneakerNet.
Authors have been seeking ways to avoid distractions for decades, and it goes well beyond pervasive connectivity. Sometimes the very features that aid them in their work can also hinder them. For example: computers vastly simplify the editing process, yet one of the earliest pieces of advice I saw was to turn off the computer monitor while writing in order to avoid editing prematurely.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar#Notable_users [1] https://www.sfwriter.com/ws-vdos.htm
I do this by closing my eyes while writing. Makes the writing more descriptive and easier to imagine big scenes with a lot of color and vibrance. Using the 10 finger writing system, I am really fast doing this.
A much better modern alternative is the Alphasmart Neo 2.
* It was designed for elementary school children so it's decently rugged. * It runs a long time (months) on 2 AA batteries. * To get the text off the device, it impersonates a USB keyboard, making it compatible with basically every computer.
It's fairly easy (not always cheap) to get almost any old computer you could think of in very good condition to run the programs you like without further hassles. This can make a lot of sense because sometimes there are hassles associated to virtualisation/emulation/modern hardware.
Maybe you feel at home using WordStar 4.0 + VGA text mode in a CRT monitor. If that's the case, you can't beat the ease and responsiveness of a DOS computer. I have this conviction that there's nothing wrong with that.
I also toyed with releasing the setup as a USB boot image, but the copyright on WordStar is still very much active :(
But a predilection towards WordStar isn't just about not having fancy icons and weird ribbons, as author Robert Sawyer[1] pointed out. The "long page" metaphor and a short-cut friendly environment should be somewhat understandable for us programmer people.
[1] - https://onezero.medium.com/this-35-keyboard-for-children-tra...
- quote - @nordsieck
>> George R.R. Martin uses Wordstar 4.0 on DOS to write the Game of Thrones novels
> A much better modern alternative is the Alphasmart Neo 2.
* It was designed for elementary school children so it's decently rugged. * It runs a long time (months) on 2 AA batteries. * To get the text off the device, it impersonates a USB keyboard, making it compatible with basically every computer. - unquote -
Yeah, that's what the hipsters say. With a maximum of 5 rows of visible text I don't think it would be a very good option for novels.