Also, if sixel support were added, it could support graphics. See:
https://github.com/taviso/wpunix/wiki/Terminals
If sixels somehow are already supported, then it does support graphics.
This DE looks quite a bit like DOS - or at least the UI seen via apps within DOS. I didn't care much for DOS back in the day...but now, i like it...of course it might be simple rose-colored nostalgia. :-)
I'm definitely getting Turbo Pascal 5 vibes. Not 6, though, because that added ASCII drop-shadows.
I see a drop shadow on a button; not sure if that specific console application had the button or if the button is part of the DE.
WordPerfect competed heavily with Microsoft Word back in the DOS days. I made money in high school with side jobs teaching people to use WordPefect for DOS, and making utilities to convert and process WordPerfect files for small businesses.
I wrote all of my high school papers on WordPerfect for the Amiga, which was basically just a straight port of the text-only DOS version.
Ha! I'd say it was more accurate to say that MS Word tried to compete with WordPerfect.
It was only with the rise of Windows that Word became a contender, and WordPerfect was relegated to trying to compete.
> a straight port of the text-only DOS version.
Just out of interest: WP was a Data General app. The DOS version was a port, as was the Amiga version, SCO Xenix, classic MacOS, all the others. The native app was a DG minicomputer program.
Part of its competitiveness in the pre-GUI era was that WordPerfect was very portable and the company ported it to almost every OS going, complete with its massive suite of state-of-the-art printer drivers.
If you were not using a DG Nova minicomputer then you were running a port.
But as GUIs became standard, they almost all included printing subsystems, using soft fonts rendered by the same code that rendered stuff on screen. Printers' own built-in fonts became irrelevant: GUIs just dumped bitmaps to the printer.
So WordPerfect's best-in-the-industry printer drivers, which supported every printer in the world and could make it do backflips, became irrelevant.
In my part of the world, on MSDOS, MS Word was not even in competition with WordPerfect.
It was only with the advent of Windows (more specifically, Win95) that MS Word started seeing non-fractional percentage of usage compared to WordPerfect 5.1
WP6 also ran in DOS but had a full fledged GUI. Ran a bit slow on the 486 but wow!
The penultimate DOS version of MS Word is freeware. MS released Word 5.5 as freeware as a Y2K fix for all previous versions.
It's quite usable. I've written articles using it.
You can run it under Linux or macOS easily using DOSemu, on 64-bit Windows with VDOS+.
I wrote about how, with a pic of it working:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/28/friday_foss_fest_runn...
Sadly, the last ever version, 6.0, is much better, with more keystrokes in common with Word 6 for Windows and Mac, and that's not freeware.
I use Tilde myself, which is very close.
https://github.com/gphalkes/tilde
I have written about it:
"Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976"
https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/17/tilde_text_editor/
Nobody got the gag in the title. 1976 was when Vi first appeared.
I really don't know why so many people are against having a bar with menus and using the arrows to navigate. It is intuitive and easy, that editor really hit the spot. Thank you for the tip.