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1. #BEST WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE IIGS FULL#
2. #BEST WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE IIGS PC#
3. #BEST WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE IIGS WINDOWS#

WordStar allows you to use these, if you're so inclined.

#BEST WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE IIGS PC#

Now, for many of these functions there are dedicated keys on IBM PC keyboards. There are many more ^Q commands, but I think you can see from this sampling that there is an underlying logic to the WordStar interface, something sorely lacking in many other programs - particularly WordPerfect. And since ^R and ^C take you to the top and bottom of the screen, ^QR and ^QC take you to the top and bottom of the document. ^Z scrolls down one line ^QZ scrolls down continuously. ^W scrolls up one line ^QW scrolls up continuously. Just as ^E, ^S, ^D, ^Xmove the cursor up, left, right, and down by single characters, ^QE, ^QS, ^QD, and ^QX move it all the way to the top, left, right, or bottom of the screen. ^Q, the aforementioned quick-cursor-movement menu prefix, extends the power of this diamond.

#BEST WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE IIGS FULL#

^R and ^C, to the right of the cursor-up and cursor-down commands, scroll the screen up and down a page at a time (a "page" in the computer sense of a full screen of text). ^W and ^Z, to the left of the cursor-up and cursor-down commands, scroll the screen up and down by single lines. ^A and ^F, on the home typing row, move the cursor left and right by words. Additional cursor-movement commands are clustered around the E/ S/ D/ X diamond: Such positional, as opposed to alphabetic, mnemonics form a large part of the WordStar interface. These four keys are arranged in a diamond under the left hand: Again, looking at a typewriter keyboard makes the logic of this plain. To serve as arrow keys for moving the cursor up, left, right, or down, WordStar adopted ^E, ^S, ^D, and ^X. WordStar recognizes that the most-often-used functions should be the easiest to physically execute. You'll see that for a touch typist, the two strongest fingers of the right hand rest over ^J and ^K on the home typing row. The last two, ^K and ^J, might at first glance seem to be arbitrary choices. Now, the first three of these are alphabetically mnemonic. WordStar's original designers, Seymour Rubenstein and Rob Barnaby, selected five control codes to be prefixes for bringing up additional menus of functions: ^O for On-screen functions ^Q for Quick cursor functions ^P for Print functions ^K for block and file functions and ^J for help. Control codes are frequently indicated in text by preceding the letter with a caret, like so: ^A. The control codes are named Ctrl-A through Ctrl-Z (there are a few punctuation keys that can generate control codes, too). When depressed simultaneously with an alphabetic key, it causes the keyboard to generate a specific command instruction, rather than the letter. The Control key is a specialized shift key. Some even lacked such keys as Tab, Insert, Delete, Backspace, and Enter.Ībout all you could count on was having a standard QWERTY typewriter layout of alphanumeric keys and a Control key.

At that time, many keyboards lacked arrow keys for cursor movement and special function keys for issuing commands. WordStar was first released in 1979, before there was any standardization in computer keyboards.

To understand how WordStar does that better than other programs, let me start with a little history. That's the key point: aiding creative composition.

#BEST WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE IIGS WINDOWS#

I've used WordStar, WordPerfect, Word, MultiMate, Sprint, XyWrite, and just about every other MS-DOS and Windows word-processing package, and WordStar is by far my favorite choice for creative composition at the keyboard. Still, most of us have endured years of mindless criticism of our decision, usually from WordPerfect users, and especially from WordPerfect users who have never tried anything but that program. Martin, Vonda McIntyre, Kit Reed, Jennifer Roberson, and Edo van Belkom-continue to use WordStar for DOS as our writing tool of choice. Green, James Gunn, Matthew Hughes, Donald Kingsbury, Eric Kotani, Paul Levinson, George R. R. Many science fiction writers-including myself, Roger MacBride Allen, Gerald Brandt, Jeffrey A. I'm not sure why they don't just use Emacs or something. Martin, of A Song of Ice and Fire fame, used a DOS-based version of WordStar, and probably still does today. 27 years later, he's still using WordStar.Īs recently as 2014, George R. Sawyer, the sci-fi author writer behind such novels as Flashforward and more recently Quantum Night. This essay was written in 1990 and updated in 1996 by Robert J.