WordStar – A Writer's Word Processor (1990)
sfwriter.com
sfwriter.com
WordStar worked with prefixes, much like Emacs. I think it used ^K and ^Q. But, no matter.
The important thing was that if you hit one of the prefix keys, a menu of all the commands would come up. And it was a non trivial menu. More a panel, full screen width, 8-10 lines long.
However, if you were fast enough, the menu didn’t appear. Or if you hit the second key of the command, it would abort the menu presentation, restore the screen and keep going.
This was important because the displays were slow. It worked on serial terminals, and rendering that menu took quite some time. Of course while it was displaying, and aborting, and restoring the display, it was buffering the keystrokes.
Not a small task on a 2Mhz 8080.
Simply, a lot of work went into this key component of the experience, to keep the interface out of your way, yet novice friendly and responsive on the very slow hardware we had back in the day.
Certainly off by default, I hope?
It's soooo helpful for discovery and recall of commands (which is a huge problem with such a complicated application as Emacs!) that the fact that which-key was included by default in Spacemacs half a decade ago is a big reason I am as proficient in Emacs as I am today, and I'm sure there are others who feel the same.
It would be very, very useful for new users. Experienced users can turn it off if they don't like it -- much like the menu bars that are on by default in Emacs.
Maybe something like "on by default if there's no .emacs" (so likely a new user) but if there is a .emacs then only on if enabled. But that probably has at least as many downsides as up.
I guess I'll just disable it along with the menus and scrollbars as I already do.
you pause, and the menu pops up to remind you
using describe bindings you have to ctrl-g out of your half entered command, run describe bindings, search for what you wanted to do (without context -- which-key has the context of your half built command and only shows relevant commands, but describe-bindings just shows everything), make note of it, dismiss the documentation buffer, and then repeat the whole command again to try again
much easier to have which-key pop up and remind you of how to continue while you're still in the middle of it, and go away on its own when you continue
if you're really proficient you won't even have to turn it off because it only appears when you pause, so you'll go so fast you never see it
which-key is not a replacement for describe-bindings, it's a contextual tool to surface that information automatically when it's needed and to dismiss it or not display it when it's not
The thing is, Microsoft Word (for Dos and then Windows) was actually a big step for this also. The standard Windows/Macintosh arrow-key-and-selection-area interface was huge step up from previous word processing. The thing is that as author says, previous word processors like WordPerfect preserved faithfully and horribly the typed-page-and-whiteout "interface". I wrote a number of college papers in WordPerfect and I found it's "modalism" terrible (though I'm sure some is nostalgic, someone found advantages).
Moreover, the select-copy-paste system is based on a few simple tools that can be grasped without special training and synergize to produce just about any edit effect. Things weren't that easy before and I don't miss that.
One thing I'd mention is that graphic editing (photoshop/GIMP/etc) is still stuck in an interface taken from paper. And that when CorelDraw and Inkscape showed a better interface that also uses a few synergizing tools, other software failed to adopt it. But the pressures on graphics software seems to be different.
As someone who has only used these applications briefly, I would love to know more about this.
Programs like CorelDraw and Inkscape treat anything you draw as an object. If you want to draw a circle, it stores the parameters of the circle (e.g. position, radius, colour) in memory rather than a rasterized version of it. If you want to create a circle that looks like a sphere, you may draw a second circle inside the first circle to serve as the highlight, then connect the circles using a blend to create the gradient effect. If you don't like the position of the highlight, you move the second circle and the blend will be automatically adjusted. If you don't like the colour, you select each circle and adjust the colours. Of course, you don't have to limit yourself to colours. The circle could contain bitmap to end up with a textured sphere. The second circle doesn't have to be a circle either. It could be a crescent shape. I used to create some amazing looking alien planets using these techniques. You don't have to limit yourself to primitive shapes either. Graphics tablets digitize a number of different parameters for strokes. You could create a stroke with the pencil tool, then modify a parameter of that stroke so it looks like it was created by a calligraphy pen or a paint brush.
That description implies an intrinsic limitation: it's greatest utility is in image creation. You could store modifications to a pre-existing raster image in a similar way, but it is not quite as useful. For detailed images, it is also CPU and memory intensive. That's not a huge issue today, but it was a huge issue when people were initially developing the standard image processing techniques.
* WordStar was created by MicroPro International
* They were acquired by SoftKey
* They acquired The Learning Company and took that name
* Then they were acquired by Mattel
* ...which sold the assets to Gores Technology Group
* ...which split into GAME Studios, yet another "The Learning Company", and Broderbund
* ...which was acquired by SoftKey?
Or maybe it was part of one of those Learning Companies that sold its assets to Riverdeep Interactive Learning Limited? I think they're now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Learning Technology.
And yet Kevin O'Leary's various opinions on business and political matters are, for some reason, widely reported even to this day.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2016/01/26/news/real-and-sh...
The WordPerfect editor has been ported from an earlier Linux version to an up to date version: https://github.com/taviso/wpunix
I was a fast enough typist that I had a little extra time to play with WordPerfect every now and then. I found its macro system and learned it. Then I wrote macros to format a bunch of raw text. Then my workflow was like typing handwritten inputs into the start of a WP doc, pressing a couple keys, then printing the results.
Our goal was to do something like 20 forms per day each. After I shared my macros with my coworkers, we could easily do that many per hour.
My boss told me to STFU and not go crazy with the productivity gains. Turns out I turned all sorts of things in that job, many involving office politics.
It’s not a clone, but you can run actual WordPerfect on Linux and Windows with a little effort…
http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/...
I was sorry to move off of WP5.1 for DOS when Windows became "the standard"; WP for Windows just wasn't the same, nor was Microsoft Word for Windows (which we switched to in any case because that's what clients were all using). The WP5.1 macro facility was very nice; among other things, I'd used it to write a simple Emacs keystroke emulator, which speeded up my writing quite a bit.
No need to use old machines with emulation around! My code doesn't run on Windows, sadly, but there are other emulators that are more portable.
edit: looks like it's 7.0's UI
Other editors like Emacs or vi have clear paradigms: in Emacs, everything is a buffer of text, manipulated by Lisp functions, and everything flows from there (eg. a keybinding is just a way to invoke a function); in vi, everything is a keystroke which does an action, and the point is to make a sequence of keystrokes do as many actions as possible (and even the modality is there mostly because there's not enough keys on the keyboard). But WordStar as described seems to have no particular idea: interactions past the typing sound like a grab-bag of features with no unifying concept, bolted on one by one by user demand & implementation ease.
The emphasis is easy typing. One notes that most of the discussions seems to come from fiction writers. Perhaps that is a commentary on the poor support for fiction writing by the tools then - it didn't matter that WordStar didn't offer you much beyond what, say, nano + a lightweight markup format like Markdown offers you. At least it didn't get in your way while typing out your latest medieval action scene or SF space opera. And simply being fast and relatively transparent was enough to make it a winner back then. "It doesn't do much easily or well, but at least the basics are reliable and they are very fast both to type and to see onscreen!" Then adding on more ad hoc features doesn't scale well, while compromising what made it so usable in the first place.
But that also explains why for all the nostalgia, you don't see a modern WordStar making much inroads anywhere. Because you can do better now, even for fiction writers - look at Scrivener, which has been enthusiastically adopted by so many writers. Just looking at the homepage https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview you can see the Scrivener paradigm: hierarchical outlining, rendered more attractive to non-programmer audiences like book writers, with modern affordances, and taking advantage of modern hardware capabilities. What would WordStar have to offer to an author who has learned to use Scrivener? Nothing, really.
This was mostly elementary school, like 6th and 7th grade. By high school I was on WordPerfect, and when I was introduced to LaTeX at university, that blew me away.
WordStar has troff-like control sequences: commands placed on their own lines beginning with dot, like .op (omit page number).
I wonder whether you could write a troff macro package to typeset WordStar files.
For the uninitiated: it’s a play on words of people shouting “WORLD STAR!!!” while a viral video is being filmed hoping the video will be featured on a site of the same name. The site and the videos are pretty unpleasant but it is part of internet culture and in no way detracts from StrongBad536’s far more wholesome pun.
It sort of ranks as the same kind of wholesome-silliness based on underlying-darkness as this image, re: a certain turn-of-the-century website whose name included the word “goat” and ended in .cx:
https://circuitglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ideal-tr...
That was a superpower that people who watched me code often asked me about, because I could mark a block using KB/KK, then move somewhere else, cut some text, delete it, do ^KV to move the block, then paste what I deleted, and so on. So you had, in a way, two buffers at hand at all times that you could flip between.
It's a feature I've not seen elsewhere. There is a block extension for VSCode, but I remember trying it out and uninstalling it for some reason.
These days, the JOE terminal editor is keeping the WordStar keyboard shortcuts alive.
Not at all the same feature, but more general and powerful, is registers in Vi-based systems. That was the feature that convinced me to learn the Way of Vim.
I get the heaviest use out of "a, "s, "d, and occasionally "f, which spare me having to think about a mnemonic for what I'm copying or cut/pasting. Sometimes I'll put a recurrent pattern in a special buffer, but not often.
Having become accustomed to registers and marks, I would find it exceedingly painful to edit text without having them available. This is a sentiment often voiced by WordStar aficionados as well.
WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092213 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344899 (May 2021)
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)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557412 (July 2018 - one for https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights)
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)
WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272952 - Sept 2014 (5 comments)
Also:
WordStar: Arrogant, Difficult, Powerful (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37891469 - Oct 2023 (69 comments)
WordTsar, a WordStar Clone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344426 - May 2021 (140 comments)
George R.R. Martin Writes Everything in WordStar 4.0 on a DOS Machine (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26695017 - April 2021 (46 comments)
Running WordStar for DOS Under Windows: VDosPlus to the Rescue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370300 - March 2021 (1 comment)
WordTsar – A Wordstar clone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549189 - July 2018 (85 comments)
What ever happened to Wordstar? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185 - July 2016 (169 comments)
Running WordStar under Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8538302 - Oct 2014 (3 comments)
When WordStar Was King (2009) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8277061 - Sept 2014 (8 comments)
George R.R. Martin Writes Everything In WordStar 4.0 On A DOS Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744952 - May 2014 (35 comments)
A Song of DOS and WordStar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732320 - May 2014 (13 comments)