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Comment by gramie | Hacker News Reader

I learned to love WordPerfect. I still miss the ability to "Reveal Codes" and see exactly where it had placed the non-printing codes to turn on/off bold, italics, to change margins, etc. When MS Word screws your entire document's formatting by typing a single letter, or moves stuff around the page seemingly randomly, your only option is to undo or reload the document.

You can read an insider's story of WordPerfect by Pete Peterson, one of the earliest WordPerfect employees. The PDF version is freely available on his website (https://wepeterson.com/almostperfect/).

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Wow, I'd completely forgotten Peterson's book existed. Thanks for the link.

My long-running quarrel with WordPerfect was always the keybindings. I can still tear through WordStar, and anything wearing WordStar's clothes, like Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, or Joe in jstar mode, like an overcaffeinated chipmunk that's made a series of questionable but deeply committed life choices about caffeine.

WordPerfect, though. WordPerfect and I never achieved détente. I never managed to internalize those key combinations. This is, on paper, a personal failing. In practice, I continue to hold WordPerfect entirely responsible.

> I still miss the ability to "Reveal Codes" and see exactly where it had placed the non-printing codes to turn on/off bold, italics, to change margins, etc. [...]

Not a full replacement for WordPerfect, but Pure has "Reveal Codes" (F9): https://github.com/roblillack/pure

Didn't MS Word have Reveal Codes ? At least for some years ? I doubt it is (or was ever) in Mac Pages.

Yes, around the Word 6 era. It also had a plain-blue-screen mode for the real WP diehards.

> Didn't MS Word have Reveal Codes ?

It has some. Getting rid of page breaks in the new Office versions is ... interesting, to say the least.

It still has some vestigial ones left, though most of them are buried under File > Options > Display now. (The most common one to show/hide Paragraph Marks/Pilcrows ¶ is also for now still on the Ribbon under Home > Paragraph [Alt+H8].)

The Word argument is that its underlying model was always "stylesheet-based" more than "RTF escape code based" like Word Perfect was so relying on "Reveal Codes workflows" was an impedance mismatch and that you should really learn its Formatting Styles system (which is also why the Styles Gallery is the biggest section of the Home Ribbon since the invention of the Ribbon).

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