It kept your fingers on the Home Keys, instead of having to search for the Function Keys, etc. It was not just the screen, it was the keystrokes (which are still hard-wired into my fingers). I did more writing with WordStar than I've ever done since. And WordStar is a great word processor - although I liked WordStar 5.5 instead of 4.0. 156 with 110 posters participating.Yep. Also home site for the wordstar command emulator add-in for microsoft word.Wordstar, CalcStar and DataStar (first office suite) were ported to CP/M86 and PC/MS-DOS.Martin is not alone in using WordStar in the SF writing world - Robert J. Rubinstein was the principal owner of the company, Rob Barnaby was the sole author of the early versions of the program.I also use the Joe variant - Jstar for most of my editing in Linux.Barnaby wrote the first version of WordStar in September 1978. It was published by MicroPro International, and written for the CP/M operating system but later ported to DOS.Although Seymour I.You could adjust them to appear when you need it, and not when you don't. Related to this, another thing that was great about Wordstar were the help levels. I found it a very interesting read and it backed up my own feelings about the structure of Wordstar's commands.
![]() Other word processors of the time required you to use the Function Keys, menus, and/or the mouse to access the commands (although some did provide keyboard shortcuts as an alternative), forcing you to take your hands off of the keyboard.Wordstar's command structure made sense once you got into the program. With practice you eventually get to the point where you can just think of doing something and your fingers will move to hit the appropriate keys. All of the commands can be accessed without having to take your hands off of the keyboard. If it's that good, I might try it myself.Wordstar's command structure is designed with touch typists in mind. Wordstar For Dos Series Of QuestionsOne is on-the-fly mail merge, where you can design a document so that when you print the document it will first ask you a series of questions and then automatically insert your answers into the document and print it. This is because all of the formatting codes were visible in the document itself (example: "^b" in the document showed where bold text would begin and end).Finally, there are a few functions in Wordstar that I don't think I've seen in any other word processor. As an example, for a page break you just entered ".pa" at the beginning of the line and hit return.While it wasn't a WYSIWYG word processor, as you used Wordstar you got a feel for what the final document would look like even without a page preview function. Also, the menus wouldn't appear if I hit the commands fast enough.Many Wordstar formatting commands could be typed directly into the document rather than having to enter a command or use a menu. I usually used it at Help Level 2 which displayed the submenus, but not the main menu. At Help Level 3 all of available commands were displayed on screen at all times, when you select a command another list of available command appears.
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