<story><title>WordStar – A Writer&apos;s Word Processor (1990)</title><url>https://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>whartung</author><text>I always thought one of the nice concepts that WS did was the presentation of the command menu.&lt;p&gt;WordStar worked with prefixes, much like Emacs. I think it used ^K and ^Q. But, no matter.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Not a small task on a 2Mhz 8080.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>WordStar – A Writer&apos;s Word Processor (1990)</title><url>https://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>joe_the_user</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Finally, to come back to the keyboard interface, I think WordStar is the least modal word processor I have ever used. On long-hand paper, writing and editing are one fluid task: there&amp;#x27;s no barrier to discourage you from switching between adding new material and modifying existing material. On a typed page, these tasks are quite distinct, especially with non-electronic typewriters. To change a word is a completely different spectrum of activities, and therefore a completely different mindset, from simply adding new words.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, Microsoft Word (for Dos and then Windows) was actually a big step for this also. The standard Windows&amp;#x2F;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 &amp;quot;interface&amp;quot;. I wrote a number of college papers in WordPerfect and I found it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;modalism&amp;quot; terrible (though I&amp;#x27;m sure some is nostalgic, someone found advantages).&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t that easy before and I don&amp;#x27;t miss that.&lt;p&gt;One thing I&amp;#x27;d mention is that graphic editing (photoshop&amp;#x2F;GIMP&amp;#x2F;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.</text></comment>