Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Word Perfect used to be the standard for legal typists. They almost invariably hated shifting to more modern word processors because of the use of the mouse. Old Dos word processors did have a learning curve, but once they mastered it they could work very quickly without taking their fingers off the keyboard. Modern Word Processors actually slowed them down! Certainly this was the complaint of many, though resistance to chqnge probably also played a big part.
If you are using Linux you can try out the feel of Wordstar. Install the "Joe" editor and run it from a shell with the command jstar. Just remember it is not wysiwg. If you learn or already know it is not a bad text editor.
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Oh,
Pshaw on why WP users liked it. Use of the mouse, etc. Pshaw on that.
we liked it because it was logical. You could control it. You SAW the coding, just like HTML. You weren't guessing. It was NOTHING like Word, which was a sheet of blank paper that second-guessed you.
I've come to the conclusion (this is not directed at you, Darryl, let me be clear) that people just make up all sorts of fooferaw about why the like WS or why they liked this or that. For example, the infamous Notjohn and I go waaaaaaay back. Hell, I'm pretty sure he goes back with my late parents, without giving away too much about his secret identity. But he still sings the Wordstar Tune, too, all with that saga about how he doesn't have to take his hands off the keyboard, it doesn't interrupt his "creative flow" and all that. I've decided, meh, that's his creative process. If he sits in a tub of liquid jello and coats himself with bananas before each writing session, to get his Jazz on, ain't my thang. Myself? I came up without mice. I fought against mice and STILL, that had sweet FA to do with my reluctance to leave WP.
I didn't want ot leave it because I bloody well wanted CONTROL, so that when I had to sit down and figure out 300 pages of a CC&R document, I wasn't wasting time with bloody secretarial work--I could focus on things like "this provision ties to the provision about who owns the common areas,' make a mark and that was IT. I didn't have to bloody GUESS as I was doing, back in the mid-80's, with MS Word.
Now, don't get me wrong. IF (and that's a huge IF which I find is answered in the negative, about 98% of the time) people actually bothered to RTFI on Word--as I finally did, admittedly dragging my feet--you can do what you need with it. To this day, WP still does a better job with mixing alignments on text in the same line of text--but other than that, Word does what's needed. So too does LO, which is clearly the 2nd-best-in-show, in terms of a MSFT Word replacement. No competitor to it that I've seen.
All the others, like this godawful Atticus app--they all focus on making users dumber and dumber and LESS competent, constantly compensating for a human desire, apparently, to NOT understand how stuff works. I guess they'll never go broke Apple-tizing stuff. (sigh).
If folks wanna sit around and use Project Zed WP software, (meh), it's their choice. That's why we have all these bloody choices. It's liek all these "authoring systems" from Novel Factory to Scrivener to Atticus to whatever the bloody hell. I sometimes think that the typical would-be writer spends more $$$ on getting software that makes him/her FEEL like a "real writer" than actually worrying about the bloody productivity of the thing.
I had some author try to BITE MY HEAD off (and lecture me, mind you!!!!) on a forum, recently, ranting about how Word was too bloody unmanageable and she couldn't "deal with" having to scroll, scroll, scroll for hundreds of pages, to find Chapter X. She'd used it for years, never understood styles, headings, the Nav Pane...
made her own life miserable. And then she made a fool of herself in front of a forum full of people who'd dropped in with popcorn.
God FORBID anybody, anywhere, anytime RTFI.
Hitch