Did you know that you can 100% legally get & run WordPerfect for free?
In fact, there are two free versions: one for Classic MacOS, made freeware when WordPerfect discontinued Mac support, and a native Linux version, for which Corel offered a free, fully-working, demo version
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WordPerfect's document model was something kind of like HTML2. It had text, with markup in-line with the text that changed its appearance, or marked something as a list or a header or a table or whatever. Word's document model was: text, all the text. Then, out-of-line, some formatting directives that said, do this to this region, do that to that region.
Word's model was in some ways more advanced, and better for letting you do things like globally change document style with a click after the whole thing was written. But sometimes you got into a state where everything was totally wonky and you just wanted to restore some semblance of normality to your document. In Word that could be really frustrating. In WordPerfect you just enabled "Reveal Codes" and it would show you all of that (ordinarily invisible) markup. Then you looked for something unexpected near the place where things started to go wonky, selected it, hit Delete, turned Reveal Codes back off... and everything was great!
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I got very used to the MS Word model -- I was training people on it back when Word 4 for DOS was current. It's far from ideal but I know how to coax it into doing nice things -- for instance, in my CV, I have lines that contain both left-justified *and* right-justified text, or even some centred text in between. This is just showing off, really, and 0.01% of people reading it will spot what I've done, but those who've fought Word and lost might be impressed.
Word is somewhere between a word-processor and a basic DTP app, and as such it falls between two stools. Whereas WP was, arguably, the greatest WP ever written.
I think that arguably the greatest pure-text editor ever was and is probably Emacs. I like Neal Stephenson's summary:
I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text ( ... )
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It.was.awful¶
The screenshots in your review don't look as bad, so presumably the version I used was earlier.
Word perfect in contrast, while not exactly ugly, did at least display spaces as actual whitespace, and was renowned for showing as much text as possible on the screen at once. No wasteful borders there. The reviews of WP for Windows were awful, but I never got to experience that. Just various MS Word and Lotus's Ami Pro (which came free with my 486)
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> the text view
Well, kinda, yes. But it supported 25-line, 43-line and 50-line text modes, and a bunch of graphics modes which could show bold, italics, underline and combinations thereof. Which was nice ( ... )
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Ah makes sense. I didn't really want to mess around too much because as a sponsored student (roughly equivalent to an intern today) we weren't really meant to be using word processors. We were meant to write it in pen and paper and pass it to the typing pool to be typed up. Now there's a term I've not used in years :-)
The senior managers didn't care that as a student, our job would be lowest priority, and they couldn't understand that (soon-to-be-) scientists could type faster than they could write, or that editing and moving text around made it made the end result read better. Fortunately they weren't around much and the lower ranked managers were a bit more with the times.
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This is part of the problem: Word tries to be all things to all people and the result is a bit of a mess.
WordPerfect is a scalpel to a Swiss army knife, by comparison.
I wonder what image "typing pool" conjures to the average millennial?
( ... )
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Most use one or two applications. But they (especially medium to large) are paying for all of them, and paying each year.
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Since there won't be any more updates, barring a remarkable _volte face_ from Corel, an AppImage might be easiest.
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