WordStar – A Writer's Word Processor (1990)
Renowned sci-fi writer Robert J. Sawyer praises WordStar, a 1970s word processor, for its efficient touch typist interface, logical commands, and creative workflow enhancements. He contrasts its unique features favorably against modern word processors.
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Robert J. Sawyer, a renowned science fiction writer, expresses his enduring love for WordStar, a word processor from the 1970s. He highlights its efficiency for creative writing, emphasizing its interface designed for touch typists. Sawyer praises WordStar's logical and mnemonic control-key commands, making it superior for cursor movement and creative composition compared to other programs like WordPerfect. He explains how WordStar's interface, based on the long-hand page metaphor, allows for easy navigation, annotation, and block marking within a document, enhancing the writer's workflow. Sawyer contrasts this with the typewriter metaphor adopted by most word processors, which he finds limiting for creative writing. He appreciates WordStar's ability to facilitate intuitive, non-linear thinking through its powerful cursor commands and robust find features. Overall, Sawyer's detailed analysis underscores WordStar's unique strengths in aiding the creative writing process, making it a preferred tool for many science fiction writers, including himself.
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16 commentsWordStar worked with prefixes, much like Emacs. I think it used ^K and ^Q. But, no matter.
The important thing was that if you hit one of the prefix keys, a menu of all the commands would come up. And it was a non trivial menu. More a panel, full screen width, 8-10 lines long.
However, if you were fast enough, the menu didn’t appear. Or if you hit the second key of the command, it would abort the menu presentation, restore the screen and keep going.
This was important because the displays were slow. It worked on serial terminals, and rendering that menu took quite some time. Of course while it was displaying, and aborting, and restoring the display, it was buffering the keystrokes.
Not a small task on a 2Mhz 8080.
Simply, a lot of work went into this key component of the experience, to keep the interface out of your way, yet novice friendly and responsive on the very slow hardware we had back in the day.
The thing is, Microsoft Word (for Dos and then Windows) was actually a big step for this also. The standard Windows/Macintosh arrow-key-and-selection-area interface was huge step up from previous word processing. The thing is that as author says, previous word processors like WordPerfect preserved faithfully and horribly the typed-page-and-whiteout "interface". I wrote a number of college papers in WordPerfect and I found it's "modalism" terrible (though I'm sure some is nostalgic, someone found advantages).
Moreover, the select-copy-paste system is based on a few simple tools that can be grasped without special training and synergize to produce just about any edit effect. Things weren't that easy before and I don't miss that.
One thing I'd mention is that graphic editing (photoshop/GIMP/etc) is still stuck in an interface taken from paper. And that when CorelDraw and Inkscape showed a better interface that also uses a few synergizing tools, other software failed to adopt it. But the pressures on graphics software seems to be different.
* WordStar was created by MicroPro International
* They were acquired by SoftKey
* They acquired The Learning Company and took that name
* Then they were acquired by Mattel
* ...which sold the assets to Gores Technology Group
* ...which split into GAME Studios, yet another "The Learning Company", and Broderbund
* ...which was acquired by SoftKey?
Or maybe it was part of one of those Learning Companies that sold its assets to Riverdeep Interactive Learning Limited? I think they're now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Learning Technology.
edit: looks like it's 7.0's UI
Other editors like Emacs or vi have clear paradigms: in Emacs, everything is a buffer of text, manipulated by Lisp functions, and everything flows from there (eg. a keybinding is just a way to invoke a function); in vi, everything is a keystroke which does an action, and the point is to make a sequence of keystrokes do as many actions as possible (and even the modality is there mostly because there's not enough keys on the keyboard). But WordStar as described seems to have no particular idea: interactions past the typing sound like a grab-bag of features with no unifying concept, bolted on one by one by user demand & implementation ease.
The emphasis is easy typing. One notes that most of the discussions seems to come from fiction writers. Perhaps that is a commentary on the poor support for fiction writing by the tools then - it didn't matter that WordStar didn't offer you much beyond what, say, nano + a lightweight markup format like Markdown offers you. At least it didn't get in your way while typing out your latest medieval action scene or SF space opera. And simply being fast and relatively transparent was enough to make it a winner back then. "It doesn't do much easily or well, but at least the basics are reliable and they are very fast both to type and to see onscreen!" Then adding on more ad hoc features doesn't scale well, while compromising what made it so usable in the first place.
But that also explains why for all the nostalgia, you don't see a modern WordStar making much inroads anywhere. Because you can do better now, even for fiction writers - look at Scrivener, which has been enthusiastically adopted by so many writers. Just looking at the homepage https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview you can see the Scrivener paradigm: hierarchical outlining, rendered more attractive to non-programmer audiences like book writers, with modern affordances, and taking advantage of modern hardware capabilities. What would WordStar have to offer to an author who has learned to use Scrivener? Nothing, really.
This was mostly elementary school, like 6th and 7th grade. By high school I was on WordPerfect, and when I was introduced to LaTeX at university, that blew me away.
WordStar has troff-like control sequences: commands placed on their own lines beginning with dot, like .op (omit page number).
I wonder whether you could write a troff macro package to typeset WordStar files.
WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092213 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344899 (May 2021)
WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370252 - March 2021 (92 comments)
WordStar: A Writer’s Word Processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898950 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557412 (July 2018 - one for https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights)
WordStar: A writer’s word processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13899238 - March 2017 (1 comment)
WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13850693 - March 2017 (106 comments)
WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272952 - Sept 2014 (5 comments)
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WordTsar, a WordStar Clone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344426 - May 2021 (140 comments)
George R.R. Martin Writes Everything in WordStar 4.0 on a DOS Machine (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26695017 - April 2021 (46 comments)
Running WordStar for DOS Under Windows: VDosPlus to the Rescue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370300 - March 2021 (1 comment)
WordTsar – A Wordstar clone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549189 - July 2018 (85 comments)
What ever happened to Wordstar? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185 - July 2016 (169 comments)
Running WordStar under Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8538302 - Oct 2014 (3 comments)
When WordStar Was King (2009) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8277061 - Sept 2014 (8 comments)
George R.R. Martin Writes Everything In WordStar 4.0 On A DOS Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744952 - May 2014 (35 comments)
A Song of DOS and WordStar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732320 - May 2014 (13 comments)
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