yeah, it went one step beyond wordstar because the menus did not drop down and cover up your screen, the menu was all horizontal, so if you knew the keystrokes via muscle memory you never saw menus flashing on the screen. i think nano does something similar these days.

Ohh, I see. It wasn't just a static menu bar at the bottom, but some hotkeys were modes and the menu bar would update when you pressed them. Pico/Pine still has something like that where ^o used to stand for "other commands" and the menu would show new hotkeys when you pressed it. I don't remember if Wordstar had some escape hatch like that. It certainly had a lot of commands.