Wordstar Users Deceased ?

[Janvi]

Comparing Wordstar with other editors to explain any benefits to young people seems pointless.  There are minimum 10 more years until my retirement and I have been using Wordstar with very early CPM versions.  A comparison with other editors, is like swapping string and brass instruments inside any orchestra.  The result is aw full but neither the musicians nor the instruments are the reason.  Both can be excellent while produced music cannot go beyond beginners level because musicians cannot use their human experience of life long practice.

After the time of DOS, there was only little time to run legacy Wordstar in OS/2 and W95 emulator box. For programming, I soon bought CodeWright (by Premia) and for the document mode Textmaker from Softmaker in Nuremberg.

Unfortunately, both of this editors also disappeared now.  Textmaker (also included in FreeOffice) recently introduced somewhat useless than ribbon menus.  To make the things worster, they also removed the classic keymap what was in fact a subset of the most important Wordstar navigation keys.  I complained about, but in the manufactureres forum there was only one other Wordstar enthusiast user who agreed.  That way, the probability of being heard goes to zero. FreeOffice is not open source.

The fact is: Latest Textmaker Version 2018 for Windows and 2018 for Linux removed the Wordstar keymap what was available with all of the 2016 Versions as predefined "classic keymap".  For the 2018 Versions, it is still possible to setup the typical Wordstar 3-keystroke sequences from user menu.  This is true for Textmaker sold within the Softmaker Office Suite.  Unfortunately this is not true for Textmaker contained in the 2018 FreeOffice suite.  They
also removed the custom keymap in the free version.  If you mangaged to define your own Wordstar keymap in 2018 Textmaker, you need insider information to save the result and there is no warranty if the patch is compatible to use in future Textmaker releases.  Possibly I wont go on paying for new Textmaker versions for this reason.  For the moment, the 2016 Versions are still working fine with W10 and Linux.

The Wordstar keymap in CodeWright was realized by a plug-in DLL.  This DLL contained several bugs (e.g.  the cntl Q-D did not work) but luckily the source for this DLL was included and it was easy to correct all the bugs. I wrote a letter with that patch long ago but Premia refused to take it and was sold a short time later completely with the product to Borland.  Today, licenses of CodeWright are still available in the store of Embarcadero Technologies but it is phased out as a "classic" product without any support. Version 7.5 was not maintained for over 10 years.
Furthermore, CodeWright was never available for anything else than Micro$oft Windows.

This situation, latest Micro$oft Office goes to 365 day subscriptions what kills their golden cash cow more and more.  For the moment, I use jstar (Joes Open Source Editor on Linux) for programmes and small notes like this text.  For programmers, Emacs is also quite sophisticated editor what is capable to run a Wordstar emulation beside other things.  Its not a complete IDE and for some features you have to study 7 years with the black belted Indian
gurus to understand.  Assume all, the time has come definitely to look for some alternatives.

As a programmers IDE, Eclipse seems an alternate future candidate.  The project is open source and written in Java.  It is a complete IDE for nothing and everything.  All features are realized by user generated plugins and there are thousands of them free and paid versions available in a store.
As you can guess, there is no Wordstar emulation available but there is a very similar project what implements the IntelliJ keymap.  I already managed to setup some Wordstar navigation commands to the default Eclipse keymap but the offered keymap system is quite sophisticated.  You can implement system depended features for Apple, Linux and Windows as well as there are diffrent states of the editor what allow diffrent keyboard behaviour similar WS
D-ocument and N-onDocument Mode and it would be even possible to emulate a subset of the old Wordstar menus with delayed pop up.  I have to dive into Java some more and probably I am going to open a Wordstar keymap project for Eclipse on Gitlab.

For Office replacement, LibreOffice as Open Source project seems a hopefull future candidate.  It prevails over OpenOffice since this went to Apache.
The project goes back to the German Star Division founded 1985 by Marco Börries in Lüneburg.  The only early product of Star Division was StarWriter what was in fact a pretty good Wordstar clone.  1999 the project was sold to SUN and later Oracle.  Toady's LibreOffice community is very active but I already failed to try any Wordstar keymaps with LibreOffice.  The framework seems not support a state machine like it is required for Wordstars 3-key
sequences and inherent functionality to adapt keymap is very limited to some well predefined single strokes.  If there is anybody familiar with the LibreOffice code (or Eclipse plugins) please drop a note here.  So long I go lurking the dev mailing lists.

[Forum Admin]

Hi Janvi,

SoftMaker Office TextMaker does allow the Ribbon to be switched to a drop-down menu. In TextMaker 2021 select the File tab, and then Options. In the Options dialog select the Appearance tab and then User interface. You will see a three Ribbon style options and two drop-down menu interface options to chose from.

To change the keyboard shortcuts select the File tab, and then Customise. Then select Customise Ribbon (not very intuitive), and then in the Customise User Interface dialog, on the lower left, click Shortcut keys. You can now add or remove the shortcut commands. This doesn't appear to have the complete WordStar style command list from a simple selection though, and it never supported the full WordStar command set.


Mike