The author Robert J. Sawyer has reissued the text editor WordStar for DOS and makes it available for free download.
WordStar receives a new ‘plug-and-play’ version from one of its most loyal users, Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer. The classic word processing program in version 7.0d received its last update in 1992 and still has many advocates today. These include authors and fans such as Anne Rice, Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Chabon, Paul Levinson and James Gunn. It is also known as the text editor that George Martin used to complete “The Song of Ice and Fire”.
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Was a huge fan in the 80s, Borland Sidekick also used Wordstar key binds. There is also:
Which is fun and in the aur.
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Oh man, that throws me back - I used to teach people how to use WordStar in the early 80’s. As I remember it WordStar was the defacto standard in those days.
Later WordPerfect became the standard, because it was the first WYSIWYG-editor, which was considered by many to be one of its strong points.
Edit: turns out my memory is playing tricks on me: WordStar was the first WYSIWYG editor[1].
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Oh this brings back to many memories! I grew up with WordStar! For those who may have also, - Joe has a mode that operates as a WordStar clone. Joe’s been a favourite of mine for longer than I can remember.
- Vim for configuration files on CLI.
- Kate for config files in the GUI.
- Joe for everything else
Thanks for sharing the news!
Edit : To be clear, Joe is literally WordStar, - it copies the shortcuts of WordStar, while also adding some of the functionality of GNU-Emacs. Can’t recommend it enough!
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