To my knowledge, jupp was and probably remains the best modern “WordStar family” editor.
Write&Set was an interesting (commercial and proprietary) system, but it doesn’t appear to have been updated lately and never had releases from or anything but Windows and OS/2.
Interestingly, Neal Stephenson is a huge fan of using Emacs for writing fiction - he refers to Emacs as his “thermonuclear word processor.” (Edit: Tony Ballantyne is another Emacs evangelist. George R. R. Martin, however is still known to be a WordStar partisan.)
I was always a WordPerfect user - I used it on VMS, DOS, and NeXT - and to this day, keystrokes like Shift-F7, F7 to print and close and F2 to search are permanently burned into my brain and my muscle memory. WordPerfect 5.1 would still rate very highly if I was asked to create a list of the best software ever written.
This perspective is interesting, particularly around the keyboard handling. That’s a reasonable thing to focus on for an editor.
I’ve been doing much of my writing in Scrivener for the past few years. Its keyboard handling is pretty typical GUI word processor-like. But, I like the way Scrivener allows me to work in small chunks that it strings together whenever I want. I, personally, like this approach for longer works, rather than choosing between one giant document and a collection of individual, seemingly disconnected files. Scrivener gives me both of those.
I also wonder if, perhaps, the fact that I haven’t learned all of the keyboard shortcuts required to navigate between files actually helps prevent RSI because I move my hands away from the keyboard more often.
There is a comp.emacs thread which discusses using Emacs and Org-mode as an alternative to Scrivener, focusing on working with text in structured blocks in a Scrivener-like way.
That’s cool, and totally unsurprising. Emacs is an OS, after all :)
The more sophisticated the tool, the more danger there is of spending lots of time getting the tool to work the way you want, rather than writing. That’s definitely something in favor of WordStar, whereas Emacs allows for totally endless fiddling.
Scrivener is somewhere in between on that particular axis.
vDosPlus is specifically focused on word processing applications and people seem to prefer it because it has some powerful print processing features as well as keyboard and mouse mapping that would be difficult to get under pure virtualization.
I’ve not had much experience with it, not being a Windows user, but it is the environment of choice and defacto standard of hardcore WordPerfect, XyWrite and ChiWriter users as well.
It’s interesting, the way he decribes WordStar makes me think of Vim, even though Vim is a lot more ‘modal’ than it sounds like WordStar is, but both seem to have a fluency of editing text that isn’t necessarily shared outside of most editors barring things like Emacs.
also there is a modern clone of it under active development hosted at https://wordtsar.ca
To my knowledge, jupp was and probably remains the best modern “WordStar family” editor.
Write&Set was an interesting (commercial and proprietary) system, but it doesn’t appear to have been updated lately and never had releases from or anything but Windows and OS/2.
(Edit: Seems I was mistaken. There is a recent release of WSedit which includes Linux and OS X ports; it is still a proprietary program.)
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Interestingly, Neal Stephenson is a huge fan of using Emacs for writing fiction - he refers to Emacs as his “thermonuclear word processor.” (Edit: Tony Ballantyne is another Emacs evangelist. George R. R. Martin, however is still known to be a WordStar partisan.)
I was always a WordPerfect user - I used it on VMS, DOS, and NeXT - and to this day, keystrokes like Shift-F7, F7 to print and close and F2 to search are permanently burned into my brain and my muscle memory. WordPerfect 5.1 would still rate very highly if I was asked to create a list of the best software ever written.
I’ve been using joe 4.5 and 4.6, and it’s jstar mode is good enough that I haven’t been tempted by jupp.
This perspective is interesting, particularly around the keyboard handling. That’s a reasonable thing to focus on for an editor.
I’ve been doing much of my writing in Scrivener for the past few years. Its keyboard handling is pretty typical GUI word processor-like. But, I like the way Scrivener allows me to work in small chunks that it strings together whenever I want. I, personally, like this approach for longer works, rather than choosing between one giant document and a collection of individual, seemingly disconnected files. Scrivener gives me both of those.
I also wonder if, perhaps, the fact that I haven’t learned all of the keyboard shortcuts required to navigate between files actually helps prevent RSI because I move my hands away from the keyboard more often.
There is a comp.emacs thread which discusses using Emacs and Org-mode as an alternative to Scrivener, focusing on working with text in structured blocks in a Scrivener-like way.
That’s cool, and totally unsurprising. Emacs is an OS, after all :)
The more sophisticated the tool, the more danger there is of spending lots of time getting the tool to work the way you want, rather than writing. That’s definitely something in favor of WordStar, whereas Emacs allows for totally endless fiddling.
Scrivener is somewhere in between on that particular axis.
As of September 2016, the author (Robert J. Sawyer) is still using WordStar, now on a 64-bit Windows 10 machine inside a DOS emulator.
You’d think he’d just use FreeDOS.
vDosPlus is specifically focused on word processing applications and people seem to prefer it because it has some powerful print processing features as well as keyboard and mouse mapping that would be difficult to get under pure virtualization.
I’ve not had much experience with it, not being a Windows user, but it is the environment of choice and defacto standard of hardcore WordPerfect, XyWrite and ChiWriter users as well.
It’s interesting, the way he decribes WordStar makes me think of Vim, even though Vim is a lot more ‘modal’ than it sounds like WordStar is, but both seem to have a fluency of editing text that isn’t necessarily shared outside of most editors barring things like Emacs.
I’m sure you meant Vim - unless you are comparing WordStar to the almighty, which is always a possibility. :)
Fixed, thanks for pointing that out!