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Sci-fi writer and WordStar lover re-releases the cult DOS app for free (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 months ago by Alphane_Moon to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's a closed source program. There's not going to be any source code unless somebody goes through the massive effort of reverse engineering it. That effort would be much better spent improving a clone such as WordTsar.

[–] solrize 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yes that's what I mean, it didn't sound like he had the source code. Are people supposed to run it under emulation, or what? This is an MSDOS version that he packaged? 700MB archive?! That is an awful lot of floppy discs.

I confess to never having seen wordstar actually in use. Does it do anything particularly interesting, or is it mostly a set of key bindings that its users like?

I'm reminded of Neal Stephenson's description of Emacs:

In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the minimalist vi (known in some implementations as elvis) and the maximalist emacs. I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's packaged with two DOS emulators and a large amount of scanned documentation, that's why the file is so big.

I'm not sure what features it has that makes anyone want to still use it instead of a modern program. I certainly wouldn't want to be limited to an 80x24 character screen when editing a large text file.

[–] solrize 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Ok I looked at a few video clips. It's an on-screen editor with a bunch of pop-up help. Not sure if it also formats on the screen. I've always been ok with using markup-style formatters (ROFF back in the old days, more recently TeX, Org-mode, and that sort of thing) instead of wysiwig formatting. So it was just a matter of having some kind of text formatter, plus a formatting program. Both of those could be very simple. Wordstar looks complicated compared with a simple but functional MSDOS-era setup.

Still, if it's what you're used to, then might as well use it. GRRM says he likes it because it's distraction free. But, I think the freedom from distraction comes mostly from his running it on an actual, single function MSDOS machine that's off the internet and separate from his main computer.