Oh, there was.

WordPerfect 6 had a full GUI mode with a very vaguely Win3-like GUI implemented in DOS.

Borland Quattro Pro had one too.

Microsoft Word could be flipped in and out of it: in it, you got WYSIWYG bold, italic, underline etc, and more lines on screen, but otherwise the UI remained much the same.

PowerQuest imitated Win95 so well in PartitionMagic it was pixel-perfect.

It was entirely a thing in the late DOS era. It let DOS apps look competitive, and yet demand far lower system requirements and run on much older machines than one needed for Windows.

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gcanyon 2 days ago | parent [-]

My time with WP ended with version 3? maaaybe 4

	▲	lproven a day ago \| parent [-]
		Are you sure? Your earlier comments expressed uncertainty if it was WordPerfect at all. WordPerfect on the PC was a very niche app before version 4.2 which was the big hit. I knew a tiny handful of places that had copies of the older version but they weren't running it. It is on the edge of before my time -- I started my first job in late 1988 -- but before WP 4.2, WordStar still dominated, with some specialist users running DisplayWrite or MultiMate. I'm not American and I think the US market was different with shareware taken slightly more seriously, so more presence of PC Write, and maybe XyWrite or other tools little seen in the British Isles.