WordTsar, a WordStar Clone | Hacker News Reader

WordTsar, a WordStar Clone

wordtsar.ca

203 pointsrhabarba140 comments

Long live WordStar and it's many brethren!

I got addicted to it when coding Z80 assembler on CP/M in the late 70's and my life since then has been on a constant lookout for an equally good program in other OS's.

In Linux and MacOS terminals there's Joe, a godsend. But since I use Qt a lot, of course the first thing I wrote was a Wordstar clone plugin for Qt Creator. Not possible to survive otherwise :-)

Where can I get that plugin?

https://gitlab.com/tungware/geezeredit

JFTR, few hours ago I googled "Qt+WordStar plugin" and found only two mentions of it (both seems like from you) - its curious that Google not show your GitLab repo is search results.[0,1]

> I need to build it, so I can compile my Wordstar-flavored editor plugin for QtCreator (maybe I'm giving away my age here).[0]

[0] https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/qt-creator/2014-May/0...

[1] https://forum.qt.io/post/370764

Hmmm one reason for Google stumbling re. GitLab might be: I was on GitHub for over 10 years (and GeezerEdit was there too) but when Microsoft bought it I fled to GitLab.

Text editors (whether it is for prose or code or math or whatever) are such a personal thing that it is always interesting to read about how and why people use certain tools.

WordStar had already been supplanted by WordPerfect (and to a lesser-extent, Microsoft Word), before I was even born, so I can’t even pretend to romanticize WordStar and its UX (which would drive me crazy, the same way Emacs drives me crazy), but it’s neat or read about how other people use their tools and why they love what they love.

What I’ve found over the years is that people become very particular about their tools and their setups but that my exact preference is not going to match that of someone else, which is part of what make the endless text editor debates so fun/enduring.

The only thing I take some issue with (and this essay is from 1990, so it gets a complete pass from me, but I mean this about most of the essays of this type), is that in order to advocate for why a person prefers a specific setup, people have a tendency to denigrate other tools. “Real writers use WordStar.” “Real lawyers use WordPerfect.” “Real hackers use [vi, emacs, IDE or text editor du jour here].” “Real screenwriters use Final Draft.” (The last one is slightly outdated and is probably “real Screenwriters use Fountain.”) Ans that just contributes to the gatekeeping/in-group dynamics that can make joining some of these established niche communities difficult/toxic.

I get the impulse; I’ve certainly been guilty of those statements in the past myself (“real writers use Markdown”), but the older I get (or maybe just the more people I’m exposed to), the more I realize is that tools are personal and that my preferred paradigm might align with some others, but there is no one true way.

That doesn’t mean I don’t still cringe when people I know and love use Google Docs for everything, but I’ve at least resisted the urge to enumerate all the reasons Google Docs is so inferior for me/my needs.

Text editors ... are such a personal thing

Sooner or later, you get imprinted with one. It may not be the first one you use, or maybe not the last one you tried.

I got imprinted with WordStar in the mid 1980s. I still use WordStar itself when I program in CP/M. And I use jstar (one of the 'joe' alter egos that pretends it's WordStar) when I program in C on Linux.

What essay are you referring to? (Since the parent link is to a site rather than a specific essay).. I'm guessing it's this one? https://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

Yes, when I wrote the comment the link was to that and then it looks like they merged two threads.

As wila pointed out already, there was a previous thread about this project. (Reposts are fine on HN after a year, so this is not a problem - see the FAQ.) Maybe worth hauling out the comprehensive WordStar list though:

WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370252 - March 2021 (92 comments)

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)

WordStar Editor Family on TextEditors Wiki - https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WordStarFamily

P.S. Few converters written in Python may be useful for those who has *.ws files:

WordStar2Markdown: https://github.com/kbarni/wsconvert

WordStar2txt: https://github.com/pstankiewicz/wordstar2txt

Robert j. Sawyer is also a prominent wordstar diehard who ought to be interested in this project :) he wrote an interesting rationale for his use of wordstar. https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

I wonder if learning proper use of vim motions would cover most of these use cases today :)

Many authors use WordStar. Here is George R. R. Martin taking about WordStar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg

I think, and I believe it has been suggested to Robert J. Sawyer, that Emacs keys are very similar to WordStar in the use of cords (or prefixed keystrokes). WordStar has ^Q as a prefix whereas Emacs has ^x, ^c, and ^h, etc.

[edit] Add bit about Emacs

Both Vim and Emacs can bind almost any(1) kind of input with the right configuration. Emacs has a lot of them in the default configuration, Vim just a bit using e.g. the leader key and Ctrl-W for window/split navigation.

But in the end it's about efficient keyboard-focused controls and it seems for many WordStar was the first one that fit the bill.

(1) except inputs consisting of multiple keys at once; terminals don't detect keyup/keydown events. Maybe Emacs can do it, I'm not familiar enough to know.

Emacs mostly uses key chords, not unlike WordStar, but its document setting capabilities are limited out of the box.

Can vim do document and book oriented content like paragraph flow etc ?

This rationale has completely convinced me that we will never see any new ASOIAF books from George Martin: even this very productive tool didn't help him finish new book in over a decade.

It's almost like the tool doesn't make the master, the master make the master.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR7XMkjDGw0

Three previous HN threads on that article, listed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27346290

Should include a 1996 tag.

I go read this every few years thinking maybe I should learn WordStar... Just like I should learn Emacs for Org Mode. Then I slouch back off to Sublime Text, Scrivener, and Word.

I still write drafts in fountain pen, though.

If you are not already invested in WordStar and have an old DOS machine on hand, then I'd strongly suggest Emacs & Org Mode.

The Emacs learning curve is pretty terrible, but once you are comfortable with Org you can do all your writing there. There's a huge benefit to having the same configuration for text editing (Sublime) and document preparation (Srivener, Word).

Can't help with the fountain pen though. :)

Emacs and org-mode are great as a way to gradually learn LaTeX incrementally. (Of course, it helps to have been using both Emacs and org-mode for awhile.)

We added the year to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345969 (thanks!) but also merged that thread into this one, since two WordStar threads on the front page at the same is one WordStar thread too many.

> Most North American users will have their system codepage set to 437, which displays the original IBM PC "PC-8" character set. If you use a different codepage, you might see accented alphabetic characters on screen where you'd expect to see some or all of the line- and box-drawing characters.

I remember WordPerfect won because it could actually use accented characters in Eastern Europe.

Also Reveal Codes. To this day I often feel lost when I need to use word processors without Reveal Codes.

His explanation of why WordStar is so good (I guess I agree with him, never used WS), reads as if you say to a programmer at gunpoint: Drink these five bottles of whisky first and then re-implement Emacs Org-Mode on a CP/M machine.

The ctrl key and block commands are almost Emacs and the duble periods are the Org-Mode markup.

Yeah, it’s really interesting to look at how people created interfaces and features before the mouse and GUI became mainstream (and to be clear, I’m not trying to get into an argument about whether a keyboard driven UX is better than a mouse-keyboard UX, generally I agree that for most people spending a ton of time with text, a keyboard-driven UX is going to be more efficient — but the GUI is a very different/separate thing).

Some of the ideas were good, some not so much. But it’s really interesting to see how people compensated for stuff like the lack of context menus and selections and comments and whatnot.

Yeah I was going to say -- just wait until this guy hears about org mode

Sawyer's "Calculating God" was the first book I would consider "real sci-fi" that I ever read, at around age 13 or so. A friend's older brother had recommended it to me and it blew my mind.

It was, for me, the turning point from reading what I now recognize to be mostly trash (primarily very early 'Star Wars' expanded universe books) to instead looking for things that had real impact. Books that made me think.

Not everything he's written has been as good, but I read whatever this man publishes- even blog posts about old text editors.

Which of his other books would you strongly recommend?

+1 for the funny, glorious and mighty name.

LOL. Thanks.

"WordStar is a word processor application for microcomputers. It dominated the market in the early and mid-1980s, succeeding the market leader Electric Pencil. It was published by MicroPro International, originally written for the CP/M-80 operating system, and later written also for MS-DOS and other 16-bit PC OSes. Seymour I. Rubinstein was the principal owner of the company, and Rob Barnaby was the sole author of the early versions of the program. Starting with WordStar 4.0, the program was built on new code written principally by Peter Mierau."

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

Yes. And it still is less annoying to use than some of its successors. (Your mileage is intended to vary.)

Yeah like WordPerfect. I remember all those strips people used to stick on their keyboards to remember all the weird function key combinations :)

Though the "submerged" screen (where you could see all the markup control codes, not sure what it was called in the English feature) was a handy feature I kinda miss in modern word processors.

It was called "reveal codes".

http://wordperfect.helpmax.net/en/creating-and-managing-docu...

To be precise, it still is and Corel actively advertises it.

The "boring" computer my parents bought in the 80's was a KayPro II with three programs - WordStar, CalcStar, and DataStar. It was great for me to learn those programs. The structure of text formatting in WordStar made HTML really easy to learn a decade later. I am excited to see if the WordStar keyboard commands come back easily to me after 35 years.

It's really interesting to compare the niche word processors of the 90s to those today, especially those targeted specifically for writers [1]. The former are all wildly different each other and from the latter, which are basically all "Microsoft Word but with chapters/folders" now -- with a few extra features tacked onto the good ones.

I'd love to see some word processors pop up that are fundamentally different again.

[1] https://www.fiction.tools/#writing-word-processors

Since it's WordStar day, I use joe a fair amount.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Own_Editor

Why host the project on SourceForge? Just force of habit? Other code forges don't look better enough to justify the effort of moving? Or are there actively good things about SourceForge these days?

Are you asking the author(s) of a project that emulates a decades-old word processor so that people don't have to learn to use a newer word processor to learn to use a newer code hosting platform? I guess this project is the very embodiment of "force of habit"...

MS-DOS 1.25 (1983) is on Github

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS

Ah, but is git on dos 1.25?

Asking for a friend.

There are a fair number of projects from the old days that just never bothered to move. I don't think anyone chooses to host new projects there

Was not SourceForge bundling malware with open source project releases?

That was the moment when I decided to drop SourceForge forever.

That changed long ago.

SourceForge was sold to a new owner a few years ago. All of that type of thing ended with the new ownership.

You don't come back from that kind of thing that easily.

Even if the current owner doesn't do that, who's to say who the owner will be tomorrow?

By that logic you can’t trust anything anywhere.

True but it is a point, and one that has lead to the emergence of decentralised open source initiatives that can never be taken over by a hostile entity.

Maybe it's time for a code 'matrix' too. Especially now that github was taken over by Microsoft, prompting many projects to move away.

I don't think Microsoft is a bad caretaker but something with zero commercial interest at heart is always better IMO.

> By that logic you can’t trust anything anywhere.

Well, that's just an argument for only using services that are open source, such that you could self-host, and more importantly, someone else can stand up a new (paid or otherwise) hosting service in competition with the one that has gone bad.

Yes, you can't, but there are lots of indicators you can use to judge how much you can trust any service.

And a service that has been sold countless times and has engaged in shady behaviour in the past scores pretty badly there.

Sourceforge is one of the few left that support Mercurial, which I use.

Isn't it easier to switch your version control than keep trying to run a project on SourceForge? I know I find it almost impossible to interact with a project hosted there.

It has become much better over the years.

>impossible to interact with a project hosted there.

That's exactly the good thing, you don't have all those trolls and forced social interaction with A-holes.

Heptapod is pretty great for mercurial hosting these days.

sr.ht supports Mercurial as well. And fits well with the old-school vibe.

But feel free to use SourceForge - fine by me. I just wish SF would hide unused stuff from the project page. The new UI is a ton better, but as an example, this project still has 'wiki' and 'git' links, even though they're both empty.

I wish there was a console version of this. Linux really lacks a good writing app for console.

All the text editors don't do on-the-fly word-wrapping (while not inserting a real line ending). Makes sense for a text editor that's normally used for config files and programming, but I would really want something more like a word processor.

There's wordgrinder but it's not great for this, it has a proprietary format so I have to export to .txt every time. Something like wordstar that would just save in text format woudl be amazing.

It's just very strange that something that is 100% natural on the web (text word-wrapping works perfectly in every textbox on the web!!) is so difficult to achieve on the console.

I heard maybe vim or emacs can do it but I'm not a fan of those tbh. I'd love something like nano...

The venerable joe editor (https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io) is apparently very comfortable for Wordstar users. I used it for a few years in college before I could afford enough RAM to run emacs and although I never actually used Wordstar myself and cant compare it that way, I really liked using joe and can still remember a lot of the keybindings 20+ years later.

It lacks word wrapping tho.

^TW .. By default it word wraps files, so editing source files with long lines gets a bit annoying, I know one can save the default options, but I've used this shortcut a lot of times that I know it by heart.

True but as far as I remember it inserts a 'hard' line ending every time it wraps. Meaning you have to go back in and clean up all those line endings if you want to go back and edit a paragraph, otherwise everything ends up out of whack.

What I'd prefer is an editor that wraps visually but only inserts line endings at the end of a paragraph (when enter is actually pressed).

Nano does this if it’s turned on. I can’t believe other editors don’t have a soft wrap option.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/122795/long-line-wr...

I see you don't care for it but I often run Emacs in terminal mode (use cmd line option "-nw"). I always configure word wrap as well.

Vim does it with

set linebreak set wrap

You can enable this by filtetype using the filetype plugin.

E.g. I have those lines in .vim/after/ftplugin/markdown.vim and TeX.vim.

Its funny, but I bet more people had the Wordstar keyboard shortcuts in muscle memory than actually used Wordstar.

I knew a few people who used Lotus 1-2-3 shortcuts for excel even though they had never used 1-2-3.

I'm one of them. Despite being a big fan of WordPerfect, I still have WordStar muscle memory from the days of Borland IDEs (starting with Turbo Pascal 3).

Are WordStar keyboard shortcuts resembling those commonly used today? Or are they their own heritage?

They predate those commonly used today.

http://wordstar.org/index.php/wsemu-documentation/wsemu-comm...

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549189

Missed that! Sorry.

Older than a year, so not a problem

No problem at all.

The only reason I mentioned the earlier discussion is because I thought it had some interesting comments.

WordStar was a really good programming editor, if you put into text mode. I wrote a lot of C and assembler code using it back in the 1980s.

And it was a good word processor - much easier to get to grips with than WordPerfect, IMHO.

I use JOE as my programming (and general purpose) editor, which is modeled after WordStar in a lot of ways. Once, I happened upon a WordStar installation and was able to use it just fine, because I already knew the concepts (I think the command prefix isn't ^K though, so it felt a bit off?)

Joe (or jstar) is my go to console editor.

Does it still save bak files everywhere though? I used it for a while and it littered folders everywhere with them as it doesn't clean them up. I tried turning it off but an update came through that changed something and turned it back on, and then I came across nano which felt nicer :)

I actually like those ~ files everywhere, because it makes for an easy and (almost) universal undo. But it does make a mess, and I understand why you might not want them. I would be surprised if you can't turn them off, though... and I'm even more surprised they came back after an update, I wonder if you set it in the system config and not a personal config, so it got overwritten when you updated; but possibly the config value changed names too. :(

That's very frustrating, and I hope nano treats you well.

WordTsar doesn't do non-document mode... though I'm thinking about it.

To give an opposite opinion form the same time period. I found WordStar much more difficult to come to grips with than WordPerfect. WordPerfect 4.2 with a XT layout keyboard is by far my favorite word processor experience to date.

I could never get to grips with WP's use of function keys. In fact, I hate all software that uses function keys.

F7 to save.

Seriously, if I could still use WordPerfect 4.2 today, I would. I would put up with 5.1 if necessary.

The Linux version is freeware now:

https://xwp8users.com/

> The Linux version is freeware now

I can't see such statement on linked site; instead its clarifies to use "legitimate copy":

> This site provides information designed to assist an owner of a legitimate copy of a version of WordPerfect, who desires to use it on a current Linux distro, in doing so.

BTW, Here is Reddit thread[0] & screenshot[1] posted in comments.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/cgw9f5/using_wordper...

[1] https://i.imgur.com/mhZ4Ahm.png

It was released for free in 1998:

https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/corel-release-free-wor...

http://www.iitk.ac.in/LDP/FAQ/pdf/WordPerfect-Linux-FAQ.pdf

The free version can still be found out there:

https://tldp.org/FAQ/WordPerfect-Linux-FAQ/downloadwp8.html

> Seriously, if I could still use WordPerfect 4.2 today, I would. I would put up with 5.1 if necessary.

Have a gander here: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/

It's all about how to (productively) use DOS versions of WordPerfect on modern Windows.

I love function keys but I hated the combos that WP used. There were just too many.

I was used to WP´s function keys; I don´t have much trouble switching between editors and word processors.

The thing that WordPerfect had that I still miss was ¨Reveal Codes¨, which would show you the exact placement and ordering of normally invisible codes (bold on/off, mark for index, hard page break, etc.)

Being able to see exactly what has screwed up your document´s formatting was a godsend. In MS Word it´s often easier to just recreate a document than to try and fix the screwed up formatting of an existing document.

I also dig the XT layout. I never tried my Model F XT with WordTsar though. I probably should!

XyWrite was the bees knees of that era, IMO. But far be it from me to make it a religious debate :-)

WordPerfect 4.2 (specifically that version) is to my mind one of the best pieces of software ever created. And amazingly it was written in x86 assembly language.

Someone tell George RR Martin

My thoughts exactly.

WordTsar won’t run on DOS!

That's a shame. Many of the WordStar holdouts actually like their writing machine to be some old reliable computer without modern distractions. It isn't just the software, it is the whole experience. It runs one program at a time, no internet, now notifications, just reliable typing on what's probably a mechanical keyboard that has exactly the right feel.

Unicomp makes leaf spring switch keyboards that are the modern day equivalent of IBM's beloved PC keyboards. They are too loud for a shared work environment but perfect for home use, assuming you don't multitask during a meeting with your mic on, anyway.

Leaf springs are different switches. Unicomp makes buckling spring keyboards - which are not "the equivalent" of IBM's Model M keyboards, but they actually are the current brand which makes the original Model M keyboards. (They were branded "Lexmark" earlier - after IBM had founded a spin-off company for them.)

They have become less sturdy over the years though.

You are correct - I went from memory and misremembered the name of the switch type in the Model M keyboards. Appreciate the clarification. What I meant by modern day equivalent is the fact these newer keyboards are available with USB.

I can appreciate this. I've written thousands of articles in Sublime Text. Sublime is not my favorite editor for coding, I prefer IntelliJ there, but sublime is beautifully simple for writing and basic editing. Being able to refactor the story, by moving sentences and paragraphs the way we refactor code, is wonderful.

After I'm happy with the first draft, I'll drop the text into google docs for a second set of eyes on spelling and grammar (I find the google docs grammar check superior to any other word processor).

I came into this thread having misread the title as being a "Worldstar" clone--imagine my surprise at it being a text editor from the 70s!

For documents longer than a page or two, I start with a mindmap. I used to start with an outline, but once I got the hang of mindmaps, I consider them essential software.

Amassing and organizing ideas is different than writing and benefits from a different tool. I find mindmapping fun.

I use freeplane https://www.freeplane.org.

Seems nice and I will give it a try!

Now a question: there is some obvious reason for using AGPL for a desktop GUI application (not a web app, a server, etc.)? AGPL would be my license to go in the later cases, so it would protect the project from being SaaSSed, but I could not find an advantage for graphical desktop apps yet.

I would guess that it’s because of the Qt libraries, but this is just an assumption.

Using Qt does not require you to use (A)GPL, and it had that license before it used Qt.

Desktop GUI apps can be SaaSed by tying them to a virtual desktop.

Or it could be using AGPL components.

I honestly can't remember why I chose the AGPL.

Lots of desktop programs are being turned into “VNC in your browser”-type things. Maybe that was it?

If you got eMacs it can be made to use WordStar commands: http://web.mit.edu/Emacs/source/emacs/lisp/emulation/ws-mode...

The site mentions UTF-8 support. Can anyone take a screenshot of this so I could see if it's worth compiling:

  שלום, עולם!

I'd be interested in ODT support as well, but there seems to be no mention on the site so I'm assuming that LibreOffice compatibility is right out.

It's still in Alpha and coded by one guy (me). Give it time...

Then I'll just take the opportunity to say thank you. I'm personally very happy with VIM and Markdown, but I know a lot of people loved Wordstar and I fear for the day when VIM will be where Wordstar is now.

Don't say such things without a trigger warning first :)

Though vi has a good track record, and hopefully will be with is for a long time still.

If you're on twitter, search for the tag #wordtsar. There's some screen shots there.

My timeline does not have any WordTsar users yet. Time to change that!

G.R.R. Martin uses Wordstar on a DOS machine:

https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/14/5716232/george-r-r-martin...

If it’s a DOS VM running on vaguely modern hardware and it has a script to encrypt and back up the VM image periodically, then that’s fine.

If he’s using antique hardware, then he’s being silly. That’s like racing a 1960s-era car: It’s fun and nostalgic as long as nothing goes wrong and you never have a crash.

Sometimes people make simple things very complex. As long as he regularly backup his work he could be using an old machine with no issues. Why does he need to backup a vm image, why encrypt it? I imagine you think he should be uploading the encrypted vm image to the cloud... Writers been doing without for centuries. But then again, what do I know... I drive a car made in 1980, a motorcycle from 1962 and use a terminal (vt52 compatible) I made out of an MDA monitor and AT keyboard...

Houses sometimes burn down. Occasionally, physical storage media catastrophically fails. When these things happen, you'd better hope that your backup process (a) worked, (b) was complete and (c) didn't suffer the same fate as the primary hardware. Hopefully the author is diligent and has backed up everything with sufficient frequency and with sufficient physical separation.

Whereas a VM backup means you can rehabilitate a functioning computer for the author with all of their data and __all__ of their esoteric configuration nuances in a matter of minutes. They can effectively have their computer reappear in front of them using any commodity hardware available off-the-shelf from any large town in Western civilisation—no need to rummage around your local community to track down esoteric, period-correct hardware components.

I don't think cloud backups are strictly necessary but given the size of a DOS virtual machine in its entirty, why the hell not? What are we talking about here, one or two megabytes after compression? That's less than one JPEG from a smartphone.

> I drive a car made in 1980

Don't crash.

> Don't crash

That's good advice in any vehicle :)

I think you are missing my point. I only say just because something is available doesn't meant you should use it. Life is not always about minimizing risk, or effort or maximizing productive output.

You can (should) do offsite backups, and even if you don't life doesn't end if you lose some of your work. Not everyone needs to rebuild their setup in milliseconds. If my house burned down my custom configuration would be the last of my worries don't know about you.

But, well. To each their own.

I wholeheartedly agree with all of the above—assuming that you are your own client. If you have the knowledge and can weigh the pros and cons for yourself, go for it. I was more thinking about a scenario where you're acting as the systems administrator for someone else who's not so technical.

If you were in charge of maintaining George R.R. Martin's WordStar workstation, at the very minimum I doubt you'd feel comfortable having it using a period-correct Quantum Fireball or IBM DeskStar...

> That's good advice in any vehicle :)

I wish it was advice. Unfortunately it's not, it's a warning. You can do everything right and still be the victim of someone else's bad luck or bad life choices. Whether it's an oncoming car or getting T-boned at an intersection, the risk of a serious crash exists no matter how good of a driver you are.

The difference between a car made in 2015 and a car made in 1980 can easily be as dramatic as walking out with superficial injuries—or certain death. The newer car will help you to wash off more speed prior to impact, it will absorb more of the crash energy in its chassis before it gets transferred to your body, and it will deploy precisely timed airbags in concert with a seatbelt pretensioner, all to ensure that the internal organs inside your body decelerate as gently as possible.

I love classic cars in the abstract, but I'd never drive one.

> I wholeheartedly agree with all of the above—assuming that you are your own client.

Yes, I was talking from that perspective. Just to remember people that not everything has to be the best possible ever.

> The difference between a car made in 2015 and a car made in 1980 can easily be as dramatic as walking out with superficial injuries—or certain death.

I was replying tongue-in-cheek. This is certainly true, and I appreciate your concern

I used WordStar on CP/M for a good many homework assignments in elementary and high school.

JOE (Joe's Own Editor) has WordStar-inspired key bindings. I used that just a very little bit thirty years ago.

Interesting. I use commercial softmaker on Linux. They offer a scaled down free version: https://www.freeoffice.com/en/

If you look for an odd program try this: https://www.papyrusauthor.com/

Made for professional writes. Last time I tried it, I must say, it was fast as f.. (Installed with WIne under Linux)

Who else thought it said Worldstar on first glance and thought it was an open platform clone of the video platform?

Every five seconds, this web site subtly vibrates up and down. Is it just on my phone?

No it has cancer.

It's because there is a slideshow with images of uneven height at the top of the page.

On WordPerfect 6.2 you could switch between text mode UI, a DOS GUI and a Windows GUI.

Brings me back to the days of using Word Perfect with a keyboard overlay...

Silly me.

I read that as Worldstar

Sadly, that comes up in any search for Wordstar or WordTsar.

I thought it was a new worldstarhiphop star destined to take over the game

Same here. Then I started thinking, what does a WorldStar alternative look like?

I thought this was going to be a dashcams only version of WorldStar.

Lol I never even heard of worldstar XD

Reply on news.ycombinator.com