> So many of those classic TUIs adopted WordStar’s sacred keystrokes.

What are the WordStar bindings and what do you like about them?

I have a general interest in the history of how these patterns emerge and what the benefits of them are relative to each other.

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ninalanyon 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They are control key sequences that are arranged so that a typist need never remover their fingers from the keyboard. The control key was to the left of the A so easily pressed with you left little finger.

You had full control of the cursor without the need for dedicated arrow keys or page up and down keys. It worked on a normal terminal keyboard. I first used it on an Apple ][ with a Z80 add-on that ran CP/M.

	▲	robenkleene 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for sharing! I'd consider all those things true for Emacs/Vim bindings as well? (Just curious if you'd disagree with that assessment.)

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disqard 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sci-fi author Robert Sawyer (who has won Hugo and Nebula awards) is a big fan of Wordstar -- he uses it to write his books.

I highly recommend reading this:

https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

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GregorBrandt 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And a modern implementation can be found here: https://wordtsar.ca

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robenkleene 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This useful, but it also seems like a very comparable feature set to editors like Emacs and Vim. So I'd still love to hear from someone who has the background to do a direct comparison, especially if they prefer WordStar.

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mkovach 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Vim was never a steep learning curve for me; more of a gentle slope. But then again, I cut my teeth on ed, and when I met sed, it felt like a revelation. On DOS, I even used edlin, a kind of ed junior with training wheels and a sadistic sense of "functional."

You have to understand: my first DOS machine was a Tandy 1000, acquired before I had a driver’s license. It was upgraded over the years and not retired until the grunge was well underway and I had already been married and divorced.

MS-DOS’s edit had WordStar keybindings; Ctrl-S to move back, Ctrl-E to move up, and so on. My dad "brought" home a copy of WordStar from work, and oh, the things that trio, WordStar, me, and a dot matrix printer conspired to create.

Borland carried those keybindings into Turbo Pascal, which I learned in college, having finally escaped the Fortran 77 gulag that was my high school’s TRS-80 Model III/IV lab. The investment into the Apple II lab didn't happen until AFTER they gave me my exit papers at a spring awards ceremony.

Why do I still prefer these tools?

Because they’re what I know. They don’t get in my way. We have history, a better and longer history that I have with my first wife. Those keybinds helped me write my first sorting algorithms, my first papers on circuit design, and the cover letters that got me my first jobs. They’re not just efficient. They’re familiar. They’re home.

	▲	robenkleene 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for sharing! (And to be clear, that's totally a great reason!) I wasn't familiar with these bindings and was curious to hear more about them, both the history and the subjective preference for them are both interesting to me.

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Narishma 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've used all three and I think it's just a matter of what you're used to. I mostly use vi but have no problem switching to the other two schemes when needed. But maybe that's just me not having strong preferences. I know some people who have trouble switching from Chrome to Firefox and those are practically identical.

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mbreese 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So is George R.R. Martin.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26695017

	▲	manquer 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not an example we want to cite for prowess of productivity with WordStar, given Martin's throughput as a writer in last couple of decades.