WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) (sfwriter.com)
149 points by droidjj 14 hours ago
EvanAnderson 10 hours ago
If you're like me and grew up using pseudo-Wordstar keybindings (me by way of Turbo Pascal and Turbo C) you may appreciate JOE: https://github.com/joe-editor/joe
mkovach 6 hours ago
I still like to start the first draft of anything substantial by moving to a single screen, opening FreeDOS, maximizing the window, and typing in Wordstar as if it were 1987. Hell, sometimes I'll even put on a nylon windbreaker.
I always preferred WordStar to WordPerfect, largely because WordStar's keybindings were easy to learn and remember. WordPerfect, by contrast, seemed to require keyboard templates, a manual, a cheat sheet, and a certain amount of divine intervention.
gramie 4 hours ago
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/).
da_rob 40 minutes ago
> 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
mkovach 4 hours ago
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.
euroderf 4 hours ago
Didn't MS Word have Reveal Codes ? At least for some years ? I doubt it is (or was ever) in Mac Pages.
kjellsbells 3 hours ago
jgalt212 5 hours ago
> WordPerfect, by contrast, seemed to require keyboard templates, a manual, a cheat sheet, and a certain amount of divine intervention.
I do recall WordPerfect masters being revered, if not more highly compensated, by the average duffer.
mkovach 5 hours ago
Yes, and most of them were lawyers or worked for law firms.
epihelix 10 hours ago
I grew up using WordStar on the Apple ][. It was great when all you had was an 80 column card, a green phosphor screen and a keyboard, but I was never sad to leave it behind when GUIs were invented. I have nostalgia for the time, sure, but not for that interface and the multi-key-stroke commands you had to learn by rote.
Each to their own, and of course finding an optimal writing environment is a very subjective thing -- but it's not like there aren't modern distraction-free writing interfaces that exist.
tonyedgecombe 7 hours ago
I remember being quite excited at moving from a DOS based word processor (Word Perfect) to a GUI based one (Word). It looked like a step up.
In retrospect the quality, quantity and look and feel of the documents I created remained exactly the same.
euroderf 4 hours ago
> a green phosphor screen
In the spirit of emacs-v-vim, I have to come down in favor of that other phosphor color of those days, amber. Better contrast !!!
user3939382 9 hours ago
> leave it behind when GUIs were invented
GUIs were invented by the Xerox PARC team early 1970s, the IIc (I have one sitting on my desk :) was 1984. Totally beside your point so I apologize. I only mention it because PARC deserves a huge amount of credit.
nylonstrung 10 hours ago
In the same way as WordStar, there's a community of DOS WordPerfect 6.0 users who claim with some validity that it's still the best for writing prose
nottorp 5 hours ago
That would be 5.1. The 6.0 graphic mode just gets in the way.
xbar 40 minutes ago
It's nice to meet one of the righteous.
ErroneousBosh 9 hours ago
In the UK at least it crops up a lot in legal circles.
Quite often solicitors have stuff on 3.5" or even 5.25" floppies that need read, converted from WordPerfect into something modern, and delivered as maybe a PDF or Word Doc.
Fortunately, solicitors tend not to be short of money (that they bill their client for) so they can often find "a guy who knows a guy" who can get that precious floppy onto a USB stick. Occasionally I am the guy who the guy knows, and it buys me the odd case of reasonably-priced wine.
amarant 8 hours ago
Out of curiosity, what kind of documents are those typically? Surely UK businesses don't need to keep financial records for 40+ years (or however long it's been since floppies were common)?
degamad 4 minutes ago
bigfatkitten 8 hours ago
ErroneousBosh 2 hours ago
overvale 3 hours ago
This article (saw it somewhere years ago) was a large influence on my emacs config. Because of it I discovered emacs' secondary selection feature, which I use all the time now.
LeFantome 14 hours ago
paradoxyl 13 hours ago
These programs are great for sitting down and writing with no distractions, but if you have a setup with directories full of word docs, text files, various graphics, even excel sheets all related to what you are working on that you need to refer to and cross-reference, they are less useful than an older version of Word or OpenOffice/LibreOffice. And they are difficult to export, share... there's a reason we don't use typewriters anymore, or DOS programs whose output is confined within a single program.
onemoresoop 12 hours ago
That looks like a different type of writing, perhaps research or business writing. Wordstar like editors that bring simplicity and a distraction free environment are best suited for creative writing.
jamiejquinn 9 hours ago
I've found trying to find a distraction-free editor a distraction in itself. I'd bet money that most authors using an old word processor had some external reason to use it (cost, availability, editor compatability) and just stuck with what they know.
wodenokoto 11 hours ago
A large fantasy adventure could easily have supporting documents with cities stats, characters, races, maps etc.
taffydavid 11 hours ago
paradoxyl 9 hours ago
bigfatkitten 8 hours ago
Back then we were far less shy about printing things.
somat 7 hours ago
After reviewing a few options I think "Just print it out" is still the best choice for long term archival. The density is not high however the hardware requirements being just one mark 1 eyeball(hardware that self replicates and has been stable for millions of years) makes it the clear winner in almost every case.
LearnYouALisp 4 hours ago
FerretFred 2 hours ago
WordStar was my first (WP) love and I found it on a CP/M computer which was being used to great effect for all sorts of office things. They later binned the computer for an IBM PC and I salvaged it. Worked great for a few more years and I really, really missed WS when it failed.
saltcured an hour ago
Yeah, I used WordStar on CP/M for my school homework in the early-mid 80s. (As soon as we had our first "typing allowed" or "typing required" kinds of assignments.)
My dad brought home a circus of different PCs in those years. First a Sinclair ZX80 kit; a VIC 20; several Morrow Designs CP/M machines; Apple III, with a IIe emulator card; this interesting sequence terminated when he hit DOS/Windows and got stuck there.
He was a pack-rat too. I pulled a CP/M machine's terminal out of storage and used it with my first Linux PC in college. It turned out it worked with an "adm31a" (?) termcap entry...
gradschool 5 hours ago
Story time. In college 40+ years ago my housemate wanted to impress this girl by inviting her to write an important paper of hers with a looming deadline on his computer with WordStar instead of her usual methodology involving a typewriter. She was using WordStar comfortably in less than five minutes but being completely new to it was unaware of the practice of periodically saving one's work. Around three in the morning it crashed and took all of her work with it. I was told she burst into tears and had left when I woke up the next morning to find my housemate busily trying to retype it from her handwritten notes.
broken-kebab 4 hours ago
The housemate did poor job introducing to computer work. "Thou shall save your work often" was the first rule in those glorious times.
Bluecobra 4 hours ago
Indeed. In high school we had a Mac (Performa?) lab running System 7 in the art department. The whole system would crash so constantly that I would manually save my work almost after every change. Really stunk when Netscape Navigator 3 crashed, because you couldn’t save your work there.
llagerlof 11 hours ago
Interesting that the guy who wrote the article is an award-winning science fiction writer and also the author of FlashForward. They even made a TV series based on it.
jszymborski 13 hours ago
I've long considered getting a netbook, slapping freedos on it and running WordStar or WordPerfect as a writing deck.
I'm not sure how I would get my files I create off the device since USB support isn't really a thing.
UncleSlacky 4 hours ago
https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos
"To get your work off the key, just insert the key into a computer that's already running any more modern OS than DOS."
jszymborski 3 hours ago
This looks like a winner, thx!
hakfoo 13 hours ago
If you use a machine with an ISA slot, you can get a card with a chip called CH375 or CH376, which deploys a USB flash drive like a normal hard disc with either a loadable driver or option BIOS ROM. You can just pull out the entire drive and mount it on a normal Windows or Linux box.
I think the below-mentioned Pocket 376 might have one soldered-on already.
toast0 13 hours ago
I thought freedos could use usb? Get something with built in ethernet or serial and you can transfer that way pretty easy too.
Or just run joe as jstar and close enough, maybe? I use joe for mostly everything, but I never used WordStar (well, I ran into it once)
prmoustache 5 hours ago
Just use any linux or bsd on a second hand netbook or laptop, install joe editor package, disable graphical desktop and boot to console only. Done.
kqr 11 hours ago
I've had similar thoughts and ended up going with FreeBSD and no network connection for my use case. It's been great. It gives you some of the expected terminal ergonomics (and USB support) without the distractions.
kevin_thibedeau 13 hours ago
It should run fine under dosemu with a minimal console only Linux.
WorldMaker 12 hours ago
Apparently the right combination of BIOS and FreeDOS gives you somewhat easy USB support: https://superuser.com/questions/740474/how-to-access-a-usb-s...
jwrallie 13 hours ago
Something like the Pocket 386 but with a regular size keyboard could be the perfect device for this purpose.
whartung 11 minutes ago
This showed up on HN a couple weeks ago:
geonineties 12 hours ago
If you want just load the dos net ios/smb stack (or a tcp stack) and go to town.
incanus77 10 hours ago
USB floppy drive on the modern computer side. I do this for old machines.
anthk 7 hours ago
Hyperbola GNU/Linux and Wordgrinder or jstar (from the Joe package) and Markdown, or even Groff as the basic syntax can be easy enough. Then you run
groff file.troff -step -k > file.pdf
If any, check Groff with Mom macros, with does what you need with ease:
Online manual:
https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/momdoc/toc.html
For a quick command:
pdfmom -step -k yourfile.troff > output.pdf
- Install groff in Hyperbola GNU/Linux (or any other) if is not installed. It's mandatory in a 99% of distros but not Hyperbola.
- get https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-2.6_d.tar.gz
- uncompress it
- copy om.tmac to /usr/share/groff/current/tmac/om.tmac
- cd to examples/ directory and do some tests:
pdfmom -step -k mom-pdf.mom > mom-pdf.pdf
2b3a51 4 hours ago
Just a footnote to parent post: Groff is developed as a complete set of programs and macro files. Debian, hence Ubuntu and other derivative distros, segment groff into a base package with what you need to display man pages (using the man macros) that comes as part of a base install and an additional package that has the mom macros and all. Just 'apt install groff' to get the full groff distribution.
ErroneousBosh 9 hours ago
CF card. Pop the card out, read it on the PC.
terminalgravity 12 hours ago
I believe George R. R. Martin uses wordstar to write his books. I still hold a little hope that he will finish A Song of Ice and Fire series.
EFreethought 9 hours ago
Maybe he hasn't finished it because he can't run WordStar anymore.
visarga 11 hours ago
I think he is busy making sure AI doesn't finish it first. Can't have AIs trample in his fantasy land.
dessimus 8 hours ago
He could have finished the series long before the Game of Thrones adaptation was in full swing, much less the general availability of LLMs. I think the HBO money made him care a lot less about ASoIaF mainline and went back to editing Wild Cards and other projects.
rrvsh 10 hours ago
LLMs are really bad at worldbuilding outside of tropes. They're great at coming up with on the fly setpieces etc. halfway through a session, but for novel concepts they really dont work that well
ggm 10 hours ago
Followed the UCSD p-system of putting command prompts on screen. Useful but also irritating to attention and screen real estate.
Usefully showing end-of-line markers. I remember thinking compared to dec-10 ROFF (which iirc proceeded nroff etc) it was both simpler and harder.
Used it, never liked it. Ed was the way.
poetaster 8 hours ago
I fondly remember writing, mostly poetry, with wordstar on my first portable, the kaypro. I still have all the files. I believe it was CPM under the hood...
zabzonk 11 hours ago
Using its text mode, WordStar made a pretty good programming editor.
jmclnx 2 hours ago
> I've used WordStar, WordPerfect, Word, MultiMate, Sprint, XyWrite, and just about every other MS-DOS
I bet you never used Wang WP or Wang WP Plus for DOS :) That is what I used back then, WP+ was good but I liked WP original better.
I never saw WordSstar but Slackware comes with joe, which I hear is close to WordStar.
EagnaIonat 12 hours ago
I still have memories of having to install Wordstar 2000 on 5 1/4" floppies. I think it was like 20 discs and painfully slow.
saltysalt 6 hours ago
Side topic, but that website is awesome.
ares623 11 hours ago
I started getting into typewriters. I could've repurposed an old X230 and disable/remove the network card physically. But I also wanted to stop staring at a screen when writing, so I gave the typewriter a try.
It's still early and I'm struggling to write more than a few lines at a time. Not surprising from how I've been commenting "witty" one-liners in comment threads for over a decade. I expect being able to write long-form with no backspacing will need a lot of time to learn.
But I want to take back my attention. If there's one thing I've learned in the last decade, is that one's attention is a precious resource and it's time to be more deliberate in how I spend it.
2b3a51 9 hours ago
Reaching back decades, I used to do a first draft longhand on file paper, cross bits out, rewrite bits. Then bang it out on a typewriter. Then once over with a red pen the next day, and a complete re-type.
I'm not sure that I could work that way now, but it was more deliberate. Less 'drive by' thought.
"Our Writing Tools Are Also Working on Our Thoughts"
(I'm talking essays for University here not deathless prose).
Rotundo 10 hours ago
I got back to writing longer texts by mentally separating writing and editing. When writing, just write. Even when you think the paragraph could be better, keep on writing.
Only start editing when a substantial piece is ready. Clean up some wording, rewrite a paragraph or two.
Even then, don't overdo it. There is always something to improve, you'll never be done that way. Good enough is good enough, hit publish and go on write the next thing.
ed_elliott_asc 9 hours ago
Attention is like a limited amount, you start the day with 100 tokens, scrolling tick-tock for an hour? 25 tokens, deep working for an hour? 25 tokens - what do you have left to do and how many tokens does it take?
I’m trying more and more to not spend tokens on things that don’t help (social media), etc.
Gibbon1 9 hours ago
The later version of Wordstar had a style template system which I thought was nice. So where Word Perfect had tags and more tags. Wordstar you just applied a predefined style to a block of text. I think somewhat like CSS.