Quote:
Originally Posted by Rizla
What's so amazing about Wordstar keyboard shortcuts that someone will run DOS to use? Please, tell me. If it's that good, I might try it myself.
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Wordstar's command structure is designed with touch typists in mind. All of the commands can be accessed without having to take your hands off of the keyboard. 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. 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. As an example, Control-K (for blocK) allows you to access commands that deal with moving text in any way, while Control-P (for Print) allowed you to access commands that affect how the text will print on paper (such as Control P-B, which inserted a Bold code into the document).
In addition, Wordstar had an excellent help system that allowed you to see the available commands right on the screen rather than having to refer to the instruction manual. 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. I usually used it at Help Level 2 which displayed the submenus, but not the main menu. 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. 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. 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. One 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.