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by dredmorbius17 hours ago |

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by alexhans9 hours ago|

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When I saw this post I immediately thought of WordPerfect.

It had such a pleasant interface for that time.

But yeah, one of the things made me go for vim over Emacs a long time ago was its relationship with touch typing and not leaving the home row with the vim modes.

Learn Vim script the hard way [1], even if you didn't end up writing any actual vim script, was a game changer in terms of understanding the semantics.

[1] - https://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/ was

by lproven8 hours ago|

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> When I saw this post I immediately thought of WordPerfect.

The final DOS WordPerfect works wonderfully on even early 21st century kit.

But it's not free. WordPerfect still exists and it's on sale.

So, in USB-DOS, I included WPEDIT, the WordPerfect plain text editor, which has the same UI but no formatting.

by lproven8 hours ago|

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> You'd have to find a suitable editor.

You didn't follow the link. You should have.

I built that USB-DOS tool and it contains a wide choice of word processors, from plain text editors with the WordPerfect command keys, to full-on professional tools, plus a choice of outliners and also a spreadsheet for the sort of writer who needs to model stuff -- like Andy Weir or John Barnes, to pick two I rather like.

by dredmorbius4 hours ago|

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I've used a long list of editors and word processors over the years, including WordStar (included in USB-DOS). My problem isn't that there aren't editors, that they aren't included with the distribution, or that they cannot be otherwise obtained and installed. It's that they're not suitable, given my needs, experience, and preferences. For me.

I've well over 40 years muscle memory devoted to vi/vim. I like and prefer its plain-text approach, modality, and (as vim / neovim) syntax highlighting, regex text manipulation, piping filters, additional features, plugins, and the like. I've gone back to older tools from time to time ... and they simply don't measure up nor would their charms be worth the transition pain.

Amongst my dead-editor menagerie, for what it's worth: DOS Edit, EDLIN, EDT and EVE (VAX), the TSO/ISPF editor (VMS), MacWrite, MS Word, WordStar, AmiWrite, MS Word, Applixware, StarOffice and successors (OpenOffice, NeoOffice, etc.) emacs, Joe, ae, pico, and probably a few others lost to memory's dust. Some of those are still available, many are not, and one lesson I've come to is that learning non-expiring tools pays off in the long run.

Vim's where it's at for me, and so long as I'm running vim its integration and usefulness with the rest of the Linux / Unix userland precludes DOS.

If all you're doing is editing text, then DOS plus a suitable word processor could well work. Speaking for myself, and only myself, of course, it doesn't.

But thanks.