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

WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996)

sfwriter.com

148 pointsTomte92 comments

Jim Fox was a key programmer for WordStar. He never got much credit. I guess because he was just an employee.

Jim thought, and talked about WordStar up until his death a few years ago on the streets of San Rafael.

I’m posting this because he would want it. Jim was so proud of his contributions to WordStar, and told anyone who was within speaking distance. Jim was pretty happy guy, but couldn’t find work, and wasn’t near crazy enough to get SSI. He was just a bit different (only different after being on the streets. He once told me, a year on the street, and the mind goes. (I didn’t see anything wrong with his mind though), and getting a programming job after 45 is difficult?

He told me a a small company (called a Startup now) hired him, but they didn’t give him time catch up. He was homeless for years, and his skills were rusty, and his suit was from a Goodwill drop box. He told me, “I was almost up to speed, and feel like I will be contributing soon.” A week later he was back in his Penguin Suit doing dances for change in downtown San Rafael. He was also the Webmaster for the Coastal Post in Bolinas. They couldn’t pay him, and he was fine with that. He also had some good ideas, but people didn’t take him serious? He had a website called Cyberthings.

I’m writing this because I heard about WordStar so much, and I like Jim. People called him eccentric, but he just didn’t have a home. Jim knew a lot of people. A couple of wealthy guys let Jim sleep on their property, but the wives didn’t like him there. I get it. It’s still a responsibility to have a homeless guy camping on your property. Jim always graciously left if asked, and never held a grudge. He used to say to me, “I just don’t want to die of pneumonia on one of these cold side streets.” I never knew what to say.

I writing this because I read he died a few years ago, and miss the guy. The San Rafael police went out of their way to mess with him. Instead of helping, they just wanted to nail him for anything. He once got a Jaywalking ticket after asking a cop to retrieve his stolen laptop. The cop said no, so Jim walked across the street. The cop crossed the street, and gave him a ticket.

Sorry for rambling. Not in a great mood.

Your rambling is very much appreciated. I'm terribly sorry to hear about Jim Fox, it is often those who are the real knowledge behind development that get lost or left behind for a multitude of reasons, which, more often than not, are problems or a fallout with financial backers, entrepreneurs or it's the work of ruthless competitors. Unfortunately, this happens not only in programming and IT but in every endeavor imaginable. Other names in the IT game that immediately come to mind that fit this description are Gary Kildall, Phil Katz and Aaron Swartz; they all deserved a much better run.

I mentioned here in another post that I used to use WordStar to write/edit assembly (ASM) as well as high-level languages source files and the illustration I've used is an excerpt from the BIOS of my Godbout CompuPro 816 S-100 8085/8086 dual boot computer. You mentioned Jim Fox for a very good reason and I similarly do so for Bill Godbout who died tragically in the Camp fire in November 2018. You'll be aware of the fire but some who are not in CA may not be:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/11/25/camp-fire-d...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Godbout

http://vcfed.org/wp/2018/11/13/r-i-p-bill-godbout-79/

Bill Godbout may not have remembered me but I certainly remember him. I met him in Anaheim at a computer conference and I talked with him for ages about CompuPro and his S-100 boards—I even recall a three-way conversation with him when someone inquired about the reliability of his memory boards. The conversation revolved around a then common concern about the potential for new high speed RAM with a clock speed of 20MHz [wow!] in that stray random alpha particles may cause memory errors and thus we should always employ parity checking to avoid the problems. In fact, it was Bill who actually raised the matter.

He was a very pleasant and helpful guy and I'm so pleased to have met him. To think he died in a fire—in one of the most horrible ways imaginable—is hard to contemplate. It is especially hard and upsetting when the person who has died is not just another statistic but someone one can actually put a face to.

Re Jim Fox again, I recall another conversation not with Rubinstein but with a local WordStar agent around the time of the release of WordStar 2000 but mainly about the development of version 7 and earlier (as that's where my interests were). He told me much about it and I'm now racking my brain to remember what he said. The only thing that comes to mind was that it was mainly the work of one person (this seemed a bit strange to me as I thought that MicroPro would have had many more programmers). I also seem to recall an article about the development of WordStar written by either Jerry Pournelle of Byte fame (who had a CompuPro system) or perhaps it was in InfoWorld. It's a damn nuisance I can't remember.

To your list of misfits contributing greatly whilst treated poorly, I'd add Ian Murdoch.

last tweet messages:

https://archive.is/vBS6N

That is incredibly disturbing to read.

I'm glad I did though.

Yeah, Murdoch's death was a real tragedy, he died far too young.

When one takes a moment to look one finds that there are far too many brilliant minds that fall into this misfit category. Often they are their own worst enemy and the world doesn't respond kindly to the fact.

Another worth noting is Oliver Heaviside. He's almost forgotten these days and much of the fact was of his own making (his name really should be more prominent). Yet he reformulated Maxwell's equations into the four that we know and use today; he gave us coaxial cable, figured out impedance matching on telephony lines, essentially invented vector calculus (along with Josiah Willard Gibbs who did so independently on the US side of the Atlantic), and much, much more. Essentially, Heaviside put the finishing touches on mathematics and classical electromagnetic theory just in time and ready for the quantum mob to take over.

That said, he had little idea how to handle the scientific establishment and he was always the outsider. It's worth taking a moment to read his Wiki bio:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside

Another tragic case is this damn, damn stupid boy (he was hardly more than one and clearly acted like one):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois

Galois was dead at the age of just 20 through his own utter stupidity. To have such a great mind to leave the planet at this age is almost incalculable - in fact, he died 15 years younger than did Mozart (and we continually lament his death at such a young age).

I'd heard of Heaviside, but only recently got the beginnings of an appreciation for what he did and who he was through a series of YouTube videos by a retired, decidedly eccentric, but so far as I can tell largely legit retired GE electrical engineer, Eric Dollard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiDnheGvXRA

(My own assessment abilities are limited here, though spot-checking so far has confirmed statements and content.)

That's interesting, I'd not seen that video before.

I have the excellent book and bio on Heaviside titled Oliver Heaviside: The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age by Paul J. Nahin. I'm not suggesting you buy it but it's a good reference to look up when you're next in a library.

Also, it's a very worthwhile exercise to download copies of Heaviside's books from the Internet Archive (there are about five or so and several come in multiple volumes). They're all out of copyright so they won't cost anything.

I'm not suggesting you read them through seriously but if you just peruse them for a while then you'll soon learn what a genius he was.

Within minutes, you'll get the message that he doesn't abide fools well and that he was not averse to making side comments in his textbooks (actually I find that aspect of his writing interesting because you get the gist of how he's thinking), but overall you'll be taken aback at his rigor. These books were written around 120-140 years ago, if you put them under a modern cover and you weren't overly famimiar with the subject then you could be forgiven for thinking that they were written yesterday.

Remember Heaviside also invented vector calculus and much of the modern electrical terminology such as impedance, conductance, admittance, permeability and permittivity, etc. It's amazing, but these terms are all now commonplace in our testbooks. I cannot recall of any other person who has introduced so many new scientific terms to science and engineering as Heaviside did.

You're correct, he was eccentric especially towards the end of his life. I reckon I'd likely have had an argument with him within minutes of meeting him but that's irrelevant here, it's the content of technical mind that we're interested in. Remember, he wasn't the only genius with an awkward temperament, from many accounts Issac Newton was likely much worse - and often petty minded into the bargin.

Wow, that is touching. I remember seeing the name "Jim Fox" when using Wordstar back when I was in school in India in 1997.

As a kid I thought it was a pseudonym. I did at some point wonder, what he went on to build. Your description of what he was going through, makes me hope that his memory will be well honored.

No need to say sorry, I would have never known. A guy who wrote an important piece of history died on the streets ? What a shame !

I've used many wordprocessors but WordStar still is my favorite, I first used it under CP/M and later on the IBM PC. Anyone who has used it knows that once you got the feel for the WordStar keystroke diamond it was magic to use. I still have hundreds of files in WordStar format and I can either import them into a GUI WYSIWYG WP or I can still use them in WordStar 7 running under an emulated environment in Windows.

WordStar came in various varieties with version 7 the last before it changed direction to WordStar 2000 (which, incidentally, was well before the year 2000). This put death knell on WordStar as its keystrokes were different to previous ones. Making a stupid and unpopular change like that ought to be a lesson for every software developer

When WordStar 2000 was released I recall that when at an exhibition having an argument with Seymour Rubinstein, CEO of MicroPro, WS's developer, about these stupid changes. I told him bluntly that I would not be upgrading from version 7 as I saw no reason why I should relearn all the hard-earned keystrokes for little advantage. The fact that WordStar 2000 failed, it seems that I was far from being alone with that view.

Incidentally, for those who are not familiar with WordStar, MicroPro or Seymour Rubinstein—Seymour Rubinstein was the inventor of the now infamous EULA—End User License Agreement! WordStar was close to the first program to have an EULA attached (from memory I think WordMaster (an earlier WP that predated WordStar), was actually first—someone correct me if I'm wrong).

> I've used many wordprocessors but X still is my favorite

The best X is the X you know.

Yeah, right, it's usually the case, but I've used MS Word, LibO, and many others since that time and for a much longer time than I ever used WordStar (consistently that is). The difference with WordStar is that one doesn't get sidetracked with layout and other futzing about, it was all WP without distractions.

>(from memory I think WordMaster (an earlier WP that predated WordStar), was actually first—someone correct me if I'm wrong)

From a cursory search, it seems that WordMaster is the direct predecessor to WordStar, programmed by the same person.

From memory—it's been a long time—WordMaster was MicroPro's first product so presumably Rubinstein applied the EULA to it first (thus it was likely the first with an EULA). If not, then I'd guess he'd have applied the EULA with later issues/releases as WordMaster was also concurrently available along with WordStar.

Anyone with an original CP/M WordMaster 8" floppy (or its contents) to check?

The ESDX 'diamond' would be nightmare to use on an ortholinear keyboard.

> WordStar keystroke diamond

reminds me of Alias software (Maya but maybe others) use or layout as ergonomics.

They used QWER and ZXCV as main rapid keybindings for the most used operations (pick, translate, rotate, scale). You didn't have to invest more than 20 seconds to remember that.

A lot of knowledge of this kind is probably locked in old forgotten ware.

Think you're right, it rings bell (albeit faint). Did the Wang wordprocessor use it too? (I used a Wang WP a few times long ago but I've no idea now. In fact the Wang was the very first WP I used — except for KP26/29 card punches with an IBM-360.) :-)

The Wang WP didn't use the Wordstar diamond. It used function keys heavily, copied later (or ported) by a program called Multimate to the IBM PC.

Yeah, on second thoughts I reckon you're right. The last time I used one was around '73 - '74 or so - so now it's all pretty vague. The few things that I can recall are that it was a large console model that used 8" floppy disks and editing was as slow as a wet week (writing to the floppy took a long time especially for a large document of around 50-100 pages).

Indeed, such a boost in ergonomics and productivity with just a "simple" choice. Btw, I was always amazed by people breaking this functionality by insisting using other keyboard layouts, more appropriate for text.

I don't have a deep personal affectation for WordStar, although I do appreciate it's keyboard layout, but what I do miss is writers having opinions about these things.

These days it seems that it's mostly "whatever version of Word that came with my Laptop/Times New Roman 12".

We programmers still have our "holy wars" (although I see a decrease of passion here, too, with safe choices like VSC or IntelliJ being more and more the default.) But back in the days, even writers with non-CS backgrounds could wax poetic about XyWrite vs. WordStar vs. Word (DOS/Win/Mac) vs WordPerfect. (Heck, WordPerfect even made lawyers have an opinion of their own)

Those debates continue - to Scrivener or not to Scrivener is quite the topic with long-form writers. And Final Draft is heavily discussed.

But the reason the debate is dying out is because the competition is dying out: Word won. And that doesn’t mean the app, it means all the Simonyi-type ways of thinking it brings with it: paragraph-level formatting with overrides, single frame with embeds, no visible codes beyond P-marks, output-dependent page definition, local fonts, etc.

It’s like if all editors were just vi variants and nobody was trying anything else any longer.

Which is a damn shame, because there are an awful lot of alternative approaches to rich document creation that could be explored, especially now the printed page is probably the least important part of things, but developers don’t care (plain text obsessives, usually) and the industry doesn’t (because competing with Word and GDocs doesn’t make you rich).

Instead what action there would be in the space has moved to things like Notion. Which is great for note-takers, less so for writers.

> Those debates continue - to Scrivener or not to Scrivener is quite the topic with long-form writers. And Final Draft is heavily discussed.

Where could I find such discussions? Do you remember any links?

> WordPerfect. (Heck, WordPerfect even made lawyers have an opinion of their own)

IIRC, WordPerfect is only still a thing because Word still does not do footnotes the way lawyers like (and courts require).

Oh, french court room I helped last summer does indeed use WordPerfect 12 .. it might very well be due to this sort of arguments.

or the lack of public funding to modernize justice...

Plausible but I'm sure MS would have managed to extract a deal even then

It's much more than footnotes. Courts have a lot of very picky formatting requirements, plus lawyers care a lot about presentation. Reveal codes is the thing about WordPerfect that lawyers love the most, because it gives you fine grained control over that stuff on a character/word level without having to pray to the Word Styles god.

Courts have a lot of very picky formatting requirements, plus lawyers care a lot about presentation

Someone said once, a legal contract is a program that you run on a judge. So the formatting is as important as it is in a whitespace-sensitive language like Python.

Also, at least here in Canada, it has a huge place in the education market, I believe in part due to a deal with the school systems.

I work in legal software for courts and attorneys and can confirm WordPerfect is very much used by filing attorneys. Within the courts though, everything is typically PDF once filed.

I’m in a couple of chats with writers. There are constant discussions about tools: Google Docs, Word, Apple Pages, Scrivener, and even vim with markdown and git.

We all have different tools and different ways of writing. We’ve shared photos of our workspaces.

A lot of this doesn’t happen in public anymore because we’ve moved to chat programs like Telegram and Discord.

If curious, past threads:

WordStar: A Writer’s Word Processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898950 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)

WordTsar – A Wordstar clone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549189 - July 2018 (85 comments, including "My dad, Seymour Rubinstein, created WordStar." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557412)

WordStar: A writer’s word processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13899238 - March 2017 (1 comment)

WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13850693 - March 2017 (106 comments)

What ever happened to Wordstar? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185 - July 2016 (169 comments)

WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272952 - Sept 2014 (5 comments)

George R.R. Martin Writes Everything In WordStar 4.0 On A DOS Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744952 - May 2014 (33 comments)

A Song of DOS and WordStar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732320 - May 2014 (13 comments)

For a long time, I used Joe's Own Editor [1], which featured a WordStar keybinding mode. I still use it from time to time.

[1] https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/

I've been using joe since the 90s. One time I was helping someone with their computer and they used WordStar, so I knew the keybindings pretty much for free.

All my server deployment scripts build joe from source -- partner can't function without it. ;)

I've been using nixes since the late 90s and just...never liked emacs or vi. joe is the editor that always felt intuitive to me.

If I remember correctly, this was also the default editor in the early SuSE distributions or early Slackware. Joe is also used by Bisqwit (https://github.com/bisqwit/that_editor).

I began using WordStar in 1980 for development (in "non-document mode") on CP/M. It was the best thing ever available for that platform, and it had some features that I've never seen duplicated elsewhere (such as "column mode" cut and paste). Back when I was using it, the standard computer keyboard had the "control" key directly to the left of the "A" key (where the "Caps Lock" key is now). I was never happy that IBM moved the control key, and I was even less happy when Sun Microsystems followed suit (but for a while you could still order the Sun keyboards with the control key in the right place). I got in bad habit of moving my left hand one key left so I could use my left pinky to hold control down while using the "magic diamond" to move the cursor around. It took me many years to un-learn that bad habit.

By 1996 (when this article was written) WordStar had already committed suicide by pushing "WordStar 2000" on everybody, which completely broke the old user interface.

> Back when I was using it, the standard computer keyboard had the "control" key directly to the left of the "A" key (where the "Caps Lock" key is now).

One of the first things I do is rebind caps to control - I've never understood the need for a caps lock key

" I was never happy that IBM moved the control key, and I was even less happy when Sun Microsystems followed suit (but for a while you could still order the Sun keyboards with the control key in the right place)"

You weren't alone, that was contentious because of WordStar's keystrokes and other earlier terminals. Incidentally, I first entered text into WordStar using a VT100 terminal connected to a Godbout S100 dual-CPU (8085/8086) computer.

"By 1996 (when this article was written) WordStar had already committed suicide by pushing "WordStar 2000" on everybody, which completely broke the old user interface."

Note my earlier post re my conversation with Seymour Rubinstein. Many took him to task over the 'suicidal' change.

> "column mode" cut and paste

Emacs (of course) has rectangles.

For the graphically oriented, TextMate has had columnar cursor and clipboard operations since 2005, IIRC, and recent versions of Xcode also have a good implementation.

In my first job (early 80s), we wrote 6809 assembly in Wordstar using non-document mode. It worked very well for that purpose.

We had a Molecular Supermicro 32, basically a card cage for Z80 boards running CP/M and sharing a small (large at the time!) hard drive. My first task there was pulling serial cables to the engineering lab to hook up terminals. We had a band printer for program listings (aka backups) and a ball printer for docs. Good times.

WordStar was actually also a pretty good programming editor - I used it on Z80 CP/M and 8088 IBM systems for programming.

On the Z80, I actually had to write small assembly language routines to read the keyboard and write to the screen (by default it came with integration with CP/M only, which was pretty poor), for which WordStar provided quite a good patching tool to integrate the routines into the main executable. You could also do scary things with the printer interface.

I built a Z80 machine a couple of years ago and have had great fun learning about CP/M on it, I'm curious what was poor about using the BDOS (I assume) to access the keyboard?

BDOS was slow, and depending on platform might not support single keystrokes or single screen updates well. Going through the machines BIOS (or direct hardware access) was generally much more satisfactory, and you could also take advantage of the hardware peculiarities, which BDOS didn't unless it had been well-tailored, which it often wasn't.

You're right, here's the intro of one the ASM files for my CP/M S-100 computer, it's straight from my WordStar archives. The bare-bones, skeletal outline files came from the board manufacturer but it was constantly tweaked and recompiled using WordStar. The file is 107k bytes long (all preliminaries incl. revs deleted):

WordStar used as editor here:

  "<...>
  ; ========================== Copyright 1983, CompuPro Corporation.
  ; ||     HMX1BIOS.ASM ||
  ; ==========================
  ; CONSTANTS:
  VERS EQU 22 
  ; CP/M version number
  CBIOSV EQU 'N' ;CBIOS revision level (2.2x) (CompuPro level)
  ; LIBRARY CONSTANTS:
      MACLIB  COMPUPRO ;Disk and Serial/Parallel interface constants
      MACLIB  ASCII ;Mnemonics for common ASCII, other special characters
      MACLIB  ACTIVE ;Flags directing construction for the various
  ;CompuPro products to "customize" the BIOS
    MACLIB  CPMDISK ;CP/M disk defaults, CBIOS offsets, BDOS functions
    MACLIB  BOOTSCPM ;CP/M cold/warm boot routines for each of the
  ;possible controller types
  ; PROGRAM:
  ; The next statement produces a harmless error message if MAC is used instead.
      ASEG  ;Used Digital Research RMAC assembler and
   ORG BIOS ;LINK linker to assemble this code
   JMP CBOOT ;+00h Cold boot
  <...>"

Oh for the days when we could actually compile our own BIOSes to suit our needs!

I am a big fan of Robert J. Sawyer. He is like Michael Crichton, except tech things go good instead of bad.

On the topic of word processors: The famed New Yorker writer John McPhee only writes with Kedit, which I had never even heard of until he spoke of it a lot in his book on writing. I seem to recall a story of him needing to pin down the orginal creator at some point, well after the creator had abandoned the project, for some tech support.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/structure

https://www.kedit.com/

I think KEDIT was simply the DOS port of XEDIT, IBM's standard text editor on mainframes.

I think you are right. I think he used the line filter features to drill down to specific parts of a book he was working on.

It sounds very cool, but I wouldn't want to be bound to a mainly abandoned text editor if I were one of the most celebrated non-fiction writers. Although maybe it is his secret sauce?

Oh gosh, early word processors. My first was PFS:Write, and later XyWrite, and finally WordStar -- and WordStar was most assuredly king. Once you get the hang of the keystrokes you can fly.

For me? It's Org Mode for writing. But it's easy to understand how people can become productive in an environment which they spent time learning how to use. And of course there's a modern, Free clone called WordTsar as mentioned elsewhere in this thread if people want to try it out.

"I love my Electric Pencil." [1] Michael Shrayer's word processor was released in 1976 for the Altair computer. [2] Other versions soon followed.

[1] See ad on page 10: http://www.atarimania.com/mags/pdf/SoftSide_Vol_2_No_08.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Pencil

""I love my Electric Pencil.""

That's a blast from the past, I remember it also ran under TRSDOS and NEWDOS-80 on my Tandy TRS-80.

http://web.mit.edu/Emacs/source/emacs/lisp/emulation/ws-mode...

You can use Wordstar commands with that code in Emacs.

What I liked about WordStar was how it became the standard key layout on DOS for text editors. Software like QEdit, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++ supported WordStar shortcuts (mainly Ctrl+K+xx pairs). You could easily start a new editor and get productive immediately if you already knew the shortcuts. I think Delphi today still supports WordStar keyboard layout.

That's why I've been using Joe's Own Editor since I first installed Slackware in the 90s. I learnt the Wordstar keybindings via Turbo Pascal (used WordPerfect for word processing).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe's_Own_Editor

The distinction made between "longhand" vs. "typewritten page" metaphors of editors is an interesting one.

I've used WordStar (decades ago), it's one of a long chain of editors and wordprocessors I've had experience with on DOS, CPM, Mac, VMS, MVS, Unix/Linux, and MS Windows systems. For the past few decades, vi/vim has been my principle editor. In the past five years, largely with either Markdown, LaTeX, or HTML markup languages (there was a time I composed uni papers using nroff, long since passed...).

The notion of markup languages, with commenting, and vi/vim's movement and "editing language" seems to capture pretty much all of what Sawyer describes as "longhand" editing. With vim, I move throughout the document, either within the principle window or splitting the window to either get an additional view on the current document or open an additional one.

With markup languages, comments may be included (HTML-style for both HTML and Markdown, '%' leaders in LaTeX, etc.). And of course, what you type is what you mean rather than what you see.

To that extent I'd argue WordStar's legacy lives.

I love the WordStar key combos, and still have some relevant muscle memory. Back in the day I learned them at about the same time as using Turbo Pascal 3 - which used a few of the same ones.

Back around 2006, I did a crash project on IBM 4690 OS. At some point I got into the included editor and by the second time I hit control-K, it all started coming back to me.

That project also had to use 16 bit small memory model which brought me back to the ancient Turbo Pascal / C days.

There's a detailed history here: https://www.wordstar.org/index.php/wordstar-history

If that's too long there are several short ones, but they omit a lot of important detail.

E.g. https://history-computer.com/wordstar-complete-history-of-wo...

http://www.landley.net/history/mirror/timelines/inventors/ht...

or in a little more depth: http://www.computernostalgia.net/articles/wordstar.htm

This is the word processor that GRRM uses, he keeps an ancient DOS computer around just to use WordStar.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/words...

> that GRRM uses

Well...

That's funny. I still have WordStar living in a Dosbox under Linux. The same Dosbox runs MSDOG-6.22, along with some other programs that I like to fire up to relive the good old days. Did you know that these key bindings were also used in Borland Turbo Pascal and others? Made it so easy to edit text. Those were the days.

Not long ago I stumbled upon this modern WordStar clone called WordTsar http://wordtsar.ca/

Ah, thanks for reminding me about WordTsar. I downloaded the alpha version (0.1.74.67) in 2018, briefly tried it out and forgot about it. I see from the your link that the version I have isn't even on the website it's so old, the current being 0.3-136. I'll try it out in a moment.

The alternative WordStar that I had (and is still) running on my PC under Windows before I saw WordTsar in 2018 runs under vDos, info here (it seems that now this is only useful if you have an old version of Windows (I'm still using Win 7). Still, it may be useful if you have an old machine hanging around:

http://www.wwwriters.com/ws6-win7-vdos.pdf

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vdos/

There is also this link which may be useful:

http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1

Here's a commercial site that I've not seen until now. It looks like you have to pay for this version here but the site seems to have some good info and a few links that may be useful:

http://www.wordstar.org/

The 0.3.x tree is fairly unstable... you'll want to look at the 0.2.x tree for stability.

Updates are always on Twitter with the #wordtsar hash tag.

While we're being nostalgic, VDE, a WordStar clone, was another miracle of tiny code. I still run it now and then in a DOSEMU emulator on Linux.

https://www.sites.google.com/site/vdeeditor/Home

Out of curiosity, how is DOSEMU working out for you compared to something like Dosbox?

I've looked into it in the past; does it work like WINE, or is it basically Dosbox with better hardware and filesystem access?

I've also seen Dosemu2[1], because apparently the original was no longer under development, so I'm a bit concerned at how well it works nowadays.

[1]https://github.com/dosemu2/dosemu2

For writters missing WordStar:

- jstar+markdown. Good, but it needs a browser and CSS is tricky.

- jstar+groff+mom+ispell,entr+make for watching the file and running "make" on detecting any change. Then, a PDF viewer for the result. XDF (motif) is blazing fast.

You can just use a crappy netbook to write, or even a machine from 1997 just fine.

I always remember this exchange with real writer when I see & hear WordStar :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg

I grew up learning programming on Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, which had WordStar compatible editors, and when I moved to Unix, I ended up using joe, which I still use to this day.

I guess I’m too young for WordStar. WordPerfect 6.2 is immediate enough for me and the Alt-based menubar feels very familiar. To each his own.

For whatever reason, v5.1 of WordPerfect remains my favorite.

Agreed. Version 5.1, or 4.2 if I'm feeling particularly minimal. Alongside notes kept in a DataEase DOS v4.5 database.

I find it interesting that both of the biggest points this raises (hotkeys, nonmodality, inline comments) can be obtained with vim and latex.

I remember using it as a child at the start of the 90's on a PC, when I was just learning to read.

It was the prefered editor of William F. Buckley and famously GRRM still uses it. I tried it recently on a retro computer after decades and it is nothing to write home about.

Does anyone know of a proper file converter to Word, that supports non-ANSI characters?

You mean other than Microsoft's WordStar converter, wsconv.exe?

I never had much of a call for word processing but I do know that a good deal of the WordStar command-set and philosophy made it into a host of DOS text editors for several decades. And that in turn influenced the "easy and familiar" design of pine/pico/nano editors for *nix...

XyWrite, faster and more customizable.

I used Nota Bene, a relative of XyWrite built on the same engine, for years, and still have Nota Bene files kicking around on my Mac -- which turn out to still be readable, since the XyWrite/NB file format is actually just plain text with embedded markup.

Odd trivia: while XyWrite is long gone, Nota Bene actually survives to this day, now built on the engine that XyWrite's last owner intended to use for a never-shipped XyWrite successor.

Odder trivia: in the 1970s, there was a commercial dedicated typesetting called Atex, widely in use at newspapers, where journalists typed directly into Atex terminals. The main developers of Atex split up in the late 1970s; one group went on to develop PageMaker, and another went on to develop XyWrite. So XyWrite ended up becoming a major hit at newspapers and magazines, and PageMaker could always read XyWrite files. (And, for a long time, both QuarkXpress and even InDesign could, too.)

WordStar was the first productivity application I ever used.

Here's one of the biggest things I miss these days in computing:

...scroll the screen up and down a page at a time (a "page" in the computer sense of a full screen of text).

That scrolling is something standard on Macs from, well, as long as Macs have had page up and page down keys -- they scroll the screen, but don't change the cursor position. Home and End likewise scroll to the top and bottom of the document without changing the cursor position.

Those of us who started with Macs (or perhaps with WordStar, which I did actually use back in the day!) think this is normal and the Windows mapping for those keys is weird. :)

Ctrl-u and Ctrl-d in vim, if I am not mistaken.

"...most of us have endured years of mindless criticism of our decision, usually from WordPerfect users..."

Wow. it's like stepping through a time portal.

Having the commands as a display over the edit session was a genius move. UcSD p-system did this too for their OS.

How it showed mark-up was also good.

Easy was my first word processor. The tag line was “Easy, from the makers of wordstar”

This is where the 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' ideology with lead you.

What do you mean?

I would guess:

It's a very old, very primitive program. It predates cursor keys, printers that could use proportional fonts and a lot of other things we take for granted today. Its handling for things like printer drivers was astonishingly primitive.

For decades, this was enough: it was the best-known word processor in the world. So the company got complacent and did not improve it much.

Then WordPerfect came along, which had superb printer and font handling, and was much richer in a lot of ways. WordStar dithered while WordPerfect took over: there were several new, incompatible WordStar apps, and if you had to learn a new UI anyway, why not switch to the leading competitor?

Then the market switched to Windows and largely rendered WordPerfect irrelevant, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com