It would be great to have a terminal compatible Wordperfect alternative, like in the MS DOS days. Can you use Vim to edit documents for printing?
Reveal codes in a small way made me swear off word processing for good. We had an office document in wp 8 or 9 if remember correctly, you know the type, it lived on a shared drive and whoever needed to make changes did. anyhow it was a complete mess, internal corruption all over the place, no consistent style. one night I sat down with it and thanks to reveal codes I was able to clean it up. At which point I had a revelation, most of the sins of the document were due to the WYSIWYG interface. I was able to fix it because I could(almost) see the source. Why not cut the middleman write the document in source and render it to the final form. So I rewrote it in html. and have had a lingering resentment of word processors ever since.
You know why they call them word processors right?... Ever see what a food processor does to food?
Not the most stable software in the world, but I loved it. It made writing lab reports as a chemistry major so much simpler (especially combined with ChemDraw).
My boss was impressed, thanked me profusely, and told me to STFU about it. We’d come to work in the morning and knock out the day’s work in an hour, piddle around until lunch, then go home and enjoy the San Diego weather for the rest of the day.
That was a pretty terrific couple of months.
The book Almost Perfect [1] details those early times at WordPerfect.
Incidentally, amongst the other best software I'd be tempted by Lotus 123, DataEase 4.53, Turbo Pascal 3, and Elite (BBC).