They are control key sequences that are arranged so that a typist need never remover their fingers from the keyboard. The control key was to the left of the A so easily pressed with you left little finger.
You had full control of the cursor without the need for dedicated arrow keys or page up and down keys. It worked on a normal terminal keyboard. I first used it on an Apple ][ with a Z80 add-on that ran CP/M.
That's true-ish. But the thing about Wordstar is that it is a word processor not a text editor. Other word processors don't make this so easy. Also the standard keybindings for cursor control in Emacs are much less ergonomic.
^ = control
In Wordstar: ^S/^D moves left/right; ^E/^X moves up/down; ^A/^F word left/right; ^R/^C moves page Up/Down
Notice that all of those use only the left hand. In Wordstar almost everything to do with cursor control uses only the left hand.
Emacs is mnemonic ^b for left (back), ^f for right (forward), ^n for next line, ^p for previous line, etc. You need both hands and the keys are all over the keyboard.
This useful, but it also seems like a very comparable feature set to editors like Emacs and Vim. So I'd still love to hear from someone who has the background to do a direct comparison, especially if they prefer WordStar.
Vim was never a steep learning curve for me; more of a gentle slope. But then again, I cut my teeth on ed, and when I met sed, it felt like a revelation. On DOS, I even used edlin, a kind of ed junior with training wheels and a sadistic sense of "functional."
You have to understand: my first DOS machine was a Tandy 1000, acquired before I had a driver’s license. It was upgraded over the years and not retired until the grunge was well underway and I had already been married and divorced.
MS-DOS’s edit had WordStar keybindings; Ctrl-S to move back, Ctrl-E to move up, and so on. My dad "brought" home a copy of WordStar from work, and oh, the things that trio, WordStar, me, and a dot matrix printer conspired to create.
Borland carried those keybindings into Turbo Pascal, which I learned in college, having finally escaped the Fortran 77 gulag that was my high school’s TRS-80 Model III/IV lab. The investment into the Apple II lab didn't happen until AFTER they gave me my exit papers at a spring awards ceremony.
Why do I still prefer these tools?
Because they’re what I know. They don’t get in my way. We have history, a better and longer history that I have with my first wife. Those keybinds helped me write my first sorting algorithms, my first papers on circuit design, and the cover letters that got me my first jobs. They’re not just efficient. They’re familiar. They’re home.
Thanks for sharing! (And to be clear, that's totally a great reason!) I wasn't familiar with these bindings and was curious to hear more about them, both the history and the subjective preference for them are both interesting to me.
> So I'd still love to hear from someone who has the background to do a direct comparison
Can do.
> especially if they prefer WordStar.
I don't. I dislike both WS and Vi.
Vi (and its variants, I am covering all of them here) is a Unix tool. In the 1980s, Unix was big and expensive, and usually ran on boxes so expensive they had to be shared. So, mainly found in academia and research.
WordStar is a CP/M tool which became for a while took that dominance to DOS.
It ran on affordable standalone microcomputers you owned and didn't have to share with anyone else.
What they share is that they are designed for keyboards before things like cursor keys, Insert/Overtype, PageUp/PageDown, Home/End were added. They do not assume theys; they expect just letters, a few shift/meta/ctrl type keys, and nothing else.
So, they redefine all these functions with letters and letter combinations.
So, cryptic, idiosyncratic, hard to learn, but once you learned, fast and powerful. Touch-typists loved them, because your fingers stayed on the home row and you never needed to reach off the alpha-block and into the extra keys. (The ones that are a different colour on the classic IBM Model F and Model M keyboard.)
Vi is the Unix flavour of touch-typist's UI, for those from universities and research and maybe big rich corporations.
WordStar is the DOS flavour of touch-typist's UI, for those who bought or built their own computers and installed and ran their own software on inexpensive machines.
In its time, WS keys were everywhere in DOS. The cracks started showing when WordPerfect took the DOS wordprocessing crown, with its even weirder function-key driven UI, which really favoured the Model F layout (f-keys down the side) and contained built-in copy protection in the form of colourful keyboard templates.
Then IBM CUA came along and mostly swept that away. I was there and using DOS then and I much prefer CUA.
Same functional role, but different commercial markets.
I've used all three and I think it's just a matter of what you're used to. I mostly use vi but have no problem switching to the other two schemes when needed. But maybe that's just me not having strong preferences. I know some people who have trouble switching from Chrome to Firefox and those are practically identical.
What are the WordStar bindings and what do you like about them?
I have a general interest in the history of how these patterns emerge and what the benefits of them are relative to each other.