[libreoffice-users] Wordstar

Urmas wrote:

> That's bullshit. Ctrl+J is a shortcut for Justify and... a paragraph mark in 
> text controls.

Actually, WordStar had different Ctrl+key functions than Word. Yes, today, Ctrl+J is a shortcut for 
Justify, but back in the WordStar days, Ctrl+J did something different, as did most Ctrl+key 
combinations. Ctrl+A, for example, moved the cursor one word to the left; Ctrl+F, one word to the 
right. Ctrl+K opened up several file commands, such as Ctrl+K, P for Print. Today, these seem 
archaic, but in the day, it was lightning quick for a good typist. To make matters even better, the 
Ctrl key was positioned next to the “a” key, where the Caps Lock key is nowadays.

The WordStar keystrokes were copied by many other programs, such as my beloved PC-Write, and VDE, 
and even smaller, lighter editor.

We DOS users were slow to embrace Windows, one of the biggest reasons being the dreaded mouse. 
Touch typists hate taking their fingers off the keyboard to grab the mouse.

The DOS camp was so dedicated that I even recall an article that argued that DOS users made better 
writers than Windows users. The theory was that, while Windows users were busy trying to pick the 
right font and page margins, DOS users were focusing on the content of their writing. Now, today, I 
find myself spending more time configuring and modifying styles than I do actually writing.

And, remember the blazing speed of our old 286 PCs with 20 meg. hard drives? Despite today’s 
dual-core, multi-gigabyte monster computer, I have yet to find a word processor that loads, 
processes, and saves files as fast as PC-Write on a 1980s DOS computer. *Sigh*

Virgil
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