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Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

Something I’ve wondered for about 20 years is why I haven’t heard of any FOSS clones of WordStar or the classic WordPerfect interface? I heard that Unix users traditionally preferred typesetting tools like troff and LaTeX instead of WYSIWYG word processors. Also I don’t know how appealing console-based word processors would be to a younger generation who didn’t grow up using MS-DOS. I was born in 1989; I’ve always wanted to use WordPerfect 5.1 but by the time I needed a word processor, GUI versions of Microsoft Word were already the standard and has remained so since.

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The Joe editor has "jstar" where if you invoke the editor as this command it loads the Wordstar keymapping and looks/operates with the WordStar keybindings and screen interface. https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/

The WordPerfect editor has been ported from an earlier Linux version to an up to date version: https://github.com/taviso/wpunix

I am a fan of Joe Editor and the jstar "mode". Works well for me in SSH/Terminal sessions and where I need a bit more than nano. Also puts me left field of the vim vs emacs debate. :-)

WP5 was a godsend. I once found myself typing up a bunch of military documents to print onto preformatted forms. (Picture filling out an IRS tax form with a typewriter. Similar idea.) Typing was easy. The nitpicky formatting was a pain in the neck.

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.

There’s this for a WordStar clone…

http://wordtsar.ca/

It’s not a clone, but you can run actual WordPerfect on Linux and Windows with a little effort…

https://mendelson.org/wpdos/unix.html

And of course MS Word for DOS 5.5 is a free (official) download:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/...

I've been meaning to, but can't pull myself away from Scrivener / Manuskript / just plain text files. Has anyone tries out WordTsar lately? It does look really neat. I'm just not sure if I'm ready to trust it with my text yet.

There is always Emacs. I love this talk by Joe Dixit about how he came from things like scrivener to Emacs https://youtu.be/FtieBc3KptU?feature=shared

And within Emacs, there's org-novelist. https://github.com/sympodius/org-novelist/

FWIW, there is a separate category for the derivates in the TextEditors Wiki: https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WordStarFamily

> I’ve always wanted to use WordPerfect 5.1

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.

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