[technosmurf]

WordStar is popular with science fiction writers for more fundamental reasons. (Not because it doesn't have spell check or isn't connected to the internet.)

Wordstar treats the text like a long-hand manuscript. You can add notes to yourself like "fix this!" and deal with the edits later. Or, you can block copy large sections of text and have the computer keep a reference to it without having to "copy and paste" it immediately. I've seen George RR Martin write that he likes how easy it is to move large sections of text around in WordStar.

Here's how the SF writer Robert J. Sawyer describes it:

"... as a creative writer, I am convinced that the long-hand page is the better metaphor.

Consider: On a long-hand page, you can jump back and forth in your document with ease. You can put in bookmarks, either actual paper ones, or just fingers slipped into the middle of the manuscript stack. You can annotate the manuscript for yourself with comments like "Fix this!" or "Don't forget to check these facts" without there being any possibility of you missing them when you next work on the document. And you can mark a block, either by circling it with your pen, or by physically cutting it out, without necessarily having to do anything with it right away. The entire document is your workspace...

WordStar's ^Q (Quick cursor movement) and ^K (block) commands give me more of what I used to have when I wrote in longhand than any other product does. WordStar's powerful suite of cursor commands lets me fly all over my manuscript, without ever getting lost. That's because WordStar is constantly keeping track of where I've been and where I'm likely to want to go. ^QB will take me to the beginning of the marked block; ^QK will take me to the end; ^QV will take me to where the marked block was moved from; ^QP will take me to my previous cursor position. And, just as I used to juggle up to ten fingers inserted into various places in my paper manuscript, WordStar provides me with ten bookmarks, set with ^K0 through ^K9, and ten commands to jump to them, ^Q0 to ^Q9...

WordStar, with its long-hand-page metaphor, says, hey, do whatever you want whenever you want to. This is a good spot to mark the beginning of a block? Fine. What would you like to do next? Deal with the block? Continue writing? Use the thesaurus?

After another half hour of writing, I can say, ah hah!, this is where I want to end that block. And two hours later I can say, and this is where that block should go. I'm in control, not the program. That's clearly more powerful, more intuitive, and more flexible than any other method of text manipulation I've yet seen implemented in a word processor. That WordStar lets me have separate marked blocks in each of its editing windows multiplies that power substantially: imagine doing a cut and paste job between two versions of a paper document, but being told that you could only have one piece cut out at a time. Madness! Yet that's what WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and others would force you to do. (In WordStar 7.0, you can even, in essence, have two marked blocks per window, toggling between them with the "mark previous block" command, ^KU.)"

http://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

[atombender]

Borland's IDEs (Turbo Pascal, etc.) also implemented the WordStar keyboard shortcuts and block behaviour, and it was amazingly productive.

You could mark a block (^KB to start, ^KK to end), and you could move around, find a place to insert it, then hit ^KV to move it there. Borland's IDEs also had selecting (using shift+arrows like many UIs today), and didn't affect blocks, which meant you could do some really fast editing by combining them.

The WordStar keystrokes currently survive in JOE [1], which I use as my $EDITOR. There's also a tiny Atom plugin [2] which gives you those block commands.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Own_Editor

[2] https://github.com/iarna/atom-joe

[dalke]

The phrase I remember was that the WordStar key commands were no one's favorite commands, but everyone's second favorite. That is, everyone in microcomputing in the 1980s knew and could use the ^KB, etc. set, but preferred some other editor's way of doing things.

Looking around now, this may have come from Phillipe Khan and Sidekick. Quoting Jim Mischel at http://www.mischel.com/diary/2005/08/22.htm :

> While I'm on the subject of WordStar, I've heard a story that I haven't been able to verify. When Phillipe Kahn was asked why he chose to use the WordStar command set in the first version of Sidekick, he said that he asked a lot of people for their editor preferences. Almost everybody had a different first preference (back then it could have been Emacs, vi, Word Perfect, WordStar, Brief, Leading Edge Word Processor, or who knows what else). But almost everybody he asked knew WordStar and named it as their second preference. I don't know if it's true, but it smacks of truth. Certainly every microcomputer programmer I knew back in the late 80s was proficient with WordStar.

[segmondy]

vim and emacs provides that. with vim, you can yank go to where you want to paste it and insert in in. if you want to see it visually you can use the v command, in emacs, it's called yank-pop.

[blacksmith_tb]

There are more modern word processors that implement many of these features, for example Scrivener[1] and Ulysses[2]. Clipboard managers also help quite a bit, I can't do anything without one these days (but I also have a lot of commonly-used commands and blocks of code stored as snippets in mine, so it isn't just for juggling).

1: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/

2: http://ulyssesapp.com/

[Vexs]

Wow, it kind of sounds insane that we don't have multiple-copy paste by default now. Come to think, I can think of a bunch of times where I open up notepad to store a copy-paste.

[BMarkmann]

Emacs kill ring?

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ki...

It takes a while to get used to it, but once you understand it / use it in anger, it becomes tough to live without.

[avian]

I seem to remember that Windows had at one point something called "clipbook". I was under the impression at the time that it was about multi copy-paste, but I never figured out how it worked. Probably few people did.

[blakeyrat]

Microsoft Office shipped with a utility to do that back in the Office XP era. I don't recall it being very popular, and I'm not even sure they still ship it...

[thavalai]

You should try a clipboard manager (on Windows, I use 'ditto.' Search for 'ditto clipboard manager.')

[dredmorbius]

Excellent description of writing mechanics. As several others have pointed out, vim (and emacs though slightly differently) through its mark, copy, and move commands offers similar mechanics.

I've used Wordstar, though only for a year or so, and a quarter century ago or so. Memories...

[segmondy]

vim, supports multiple yanks in it's registers, and so does emac.

[girzel]

This is the real equivalent. I don't know vim (I assume it's similar), but emacs can put killed text AND buffer locations (and a lot of other things) into registers. To me, this is a mark of advanced Emacs usage -- familiarity and comfort with registers.