Long live WordStar and it's many brethren!

I got addicted to it when coding Z80 assembler on CP/M in the late 70's and my life since then has been on a constant lookout for an equally good program in other OS's.

In Linux and MacOS terminals there's Joe, a godsend. But since I use Qt a lot, of course the first thing I wrote was a Wordstar clone plugin for Qt Creator. Not possible to survive otherwise :-)

Text editors (whether it is for prose or code or math or whatever) are such a personal thing that it is always interesting to read about how and why people use certain tools.

WordStar had already been supplanted by WordPerfect (and to a lesser-extent, Microsoft Word), before I was even born, so I can’t even pretend to romanticize WordStar and its UX (which would drive me crazy, the same way Emacs drives me crazy), but it’s neat or read about how other people use their tools and why they love what they love.

What I’ve found over the years is that people become very particular about their tools and their setups but that my exact preference is not going to match that of someone else, which is part of what make the endless text editor debates so fun/enduring.

The only thing I take some issue with (and this essay is from 1990, so it gets a complete pass from me, but I mean this about most of the essays of this type), is that in order to advocate for why a person prefers a specific setup, people have a tendency to denigrate other tools. “Real writers use WordStar.” “Real lawyers use WordPerfect.” “Real hackers use [vi, emacs, IDE or text editor du jour here].” “Real screenwriters use Final Draft.” (The last one is slightly outdated and is probably “real Screenwriters use Fountain.”) Ans that just contributes to the gatekeeping/in-group dynamics that can make joining some of these established niche communities difficult/toxic.

I get the impulse; I’ve certainly been guilty of those statements in the past myself (“real writers use Markdown”), but the older I get (or maybe just the more people I’m exposed to), the more I realize is that tools are personal and that my preferred paradigm might align with some others, but there is no one true way.

That doesn’t mean I don’t still cringe when people I know and love use Google Docs for everything, but I’ve at least resisted the urge to enumerate all the reasons Google Docs is so inferior for me/my needs.

As wila pointed out already, there was a previous thread about this project. (Reposts are fine on HN after a year, so this is not a problem - see the FAQ.) Maybe worth hauling out the comprehensive WordStar list though:

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)

WordTsar – A Wordstar clone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549189 - July 2018 (85 comments, including "My dad, Seymour Rubinstein, created WordStar." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557412)

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)

What ever happened to Wordstar? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185 - July 2016 (169 comments)

WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272952 - Sept 2014 (5 comments)

George R.R. Martin Writes Everything In WordStar 4.0 On A DOS Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744952 - May 2014 (33 comments)

A Song of DOS and WordStar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732320 - May 2014 (13 comments)

Robert j. Sawyer is also a prominent wordstar diehard who ought to be interested in this project :) he wrote an interesting rationale for his use of wordstar. https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

I wonder if learning proper use of vim motions would cover most of these use cases today :)

+1 for the funny, glorious and mighty name.

"WordStar is a word processor application for microcomputers. It dominated the market in the early and mid-1980s, succeeding the market leader Electric Pencil. It was published by MicroPro International, originally written for the CP/M-80 operating system, and later written also for MS-DOS and other 16-bit PC OSes. Seymour I. Rubinstein was the principal owner of the company, and Rob Barnaby was the sole author of the early versions of the program. Starting with WordStar 4.0, the program was built on new code written principally by Peter Mierau."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar

It's really interesting to compare the niche word processors of the 90s to those today, especially those targeted specifically for writers [1]. The former are all wildly different each other and from the latter, which are basically all "Microsoft Word but with chapters/folders" now -- with a few extra features tacked onto the good ones.

I'd love to see some word processors pop up that are fundamentally different again.

[1] https://www.fiction.tools/#writing-word-processors

Since it's WordStar day, I use joe a fair amount.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Own_Editor

Why host the project on SourceForge? Just force of habit? Other code forges don't look better enough to justify the effort of moving? Or are there actively good things about SourceForge these days?

I wish there was a console version of this. Linux really lacks a good writing app for console.

All the text editors don't do on-the-fly word-wrapping (while not inserting a real line ending). Makes sense for a text editor that's normally used for config files and programming, but I would really want something more like a word processor.

There's wordgrinder but it's not great for this, it has a proprietary format so I have to export to .txt every time. Something like wordstar that would just save in text format woudl be amazing.

It's just very strange that something that is 100% natural on the web (text word-wrapping works perfectly in every textbox on the web!!) is so difficult to achieve on the console.

I heard maybe vim or emacs can do it but I'm not a fan of those tbh. I'd love something like nano...

Its funny, but I bet more people had the Wordstar keyboard shortcuts in muscle memory than actually used Wordstar.

Are WordStar keyboard shortcuts resembling those commonly used today? Or are they their own heritage?

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549189

WordStar was a really good programming editor, if you put into text mode. I wrote a lot of C and assembler code using it back in the 1980s.

And it was a good word processor - much easier to get to grips with than WordPerfect, IMHO.

Someone tell George RR Martin

I can appreciate this. I've written thousands of articles in Sublime Text. Sublime is not my favorite editor for coding, I prefer IntelliJ there, but sublime is beautifully simple for writing and basic editing. Being able to refactor the story, by moving sentences and paragraphs the way we refactor code, is wonderful.

After I'm happy with the first draft, I'll drop the text into google docs for a second set of eyes on spelling and grammar (I find the google docs grammar check superior to any other word processor).

I came into this thread having misread the title as being a "Worldstar" clone--imagine my surprise at it being a text editor from the 70s!

For documents longer than a page or two, I start with a mindmap. I used to start with an outline, but once I got the hang of mindmaps, I consider them essential software.

Amassing and organizing ideas is different than writing and benefits from a different tool. I find mindmapping fun.

I use freeplane https://www.freeplane.org.

Seems nice and I will give it a try!

Now a question: there is some obvious reason for using AGPL for a desktop GUI application (not a web app, a server, etc.)? AGPL would be my license to go in the later cases, so it would protect the project from being SaaSSed, but I could not find an advantage for graphical desktop apps yet.

If you got eMacs it can be made to use WordStar commands: http://web.mit.edu/Emacs/source/emacs/lisp/emulation/ws-mode...

The site mentions UTF-8 support. Can anyone take a screenshot of this so I could see if it's worth compiling:

  שלום, עולם!

G.R.R. Martin uses Wordstar on a DOS machine:

https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/14/5716232/george-r-r-martin...

I used WordStar on CP/M for a good many homework assignments in elementary and high school.

JOE (Joe's Own Editor) has WordStar-inspired key bindings. I used that just a very little bit thirty years ago.

Interesting. I use commercial softmaker on Linux. They offer a scaled down free version: https://www.freeoffice.com/en/

If you look for an odd program try this: https://www.papyrusauthor.com/

Made for professional writes. Last time I tried it, I must say, it was fast as f.. (Installed with WIne under Linux)

Who else thought it said Worldstar on first glance and thought it was an open platform clone of the video platform?

Every five seconds, this web site subtly vibrates up and down. Is it just on my phone?

On WordPerfect 6.2 you could switch between text mode UI, a DOS GUI and a Windows GUI.

Brings me back to the days of using Word Perfect with a keyboard overlay...

Silly me.

I read that as Worldstar