Yes, I’ve heard WordStar horror stories. You’re not dim-witted if WordStar doesn’t come as easily to you as to me. Oddly, I found Select—ballyhooed as a beginner’s word processor—to be more of a puzzle. Oh, well. One person’s dream software may be another’s kludge.
Keep in mind, however, that you must often suffer trade-offs between easiness, speed, power, and versatility. Although WordStar might not give you instant gratification, its speed and power may justify the struggle. Ditto for some of the best spreadsheets and other software categories. The big question is, How much word processing or spreadsheeting, or whatever, do you do? Not much? Then place ease of learning ahead of speed. Ideally, though, a program will give you both. MicroPro has tried especially hard to do this with WordStar 2000, an improvement over WordStar in learnability. Like nearly any powerful program, however, 2000 still takes practice to get up to full speed on.
Whether you’re buying a word-processing program or an accounting one, look for software with logical commands.
WordStar, in this way, triumphs. Consider the famous SEXD diamond that you use with the Control key. S is the diamond’s leftmost key; it will move your cursor over one space in that direction. E is the uppermost key and indeed moves you up. X, the diamond’s lower point, takes you a space down. Rob Barnaby, in short, has done a superb job of letting me get from place to place on the screen.
You may disagree violently. Fine. Software is personal. You’re letting a stranger—the writer of the program you use—influence your working habits.
Ideally, however, the writer’s logic and yours will be the same, so that, in the end, the stranger becomes a friend. He might be thousands of miles away. He might even be dead. Or you might loathe him if you meet him in person rather than on your disk. But in running his program, you still get the feeling Holden Caulfield got in Catcher in the Rye: you want to call up the author after he’s done such a fine job. Holden was talking about novelists. I’m talking about programmers. Ideally, they’ll touch your brain the way Holden’s literary heroes touched his heart.
GOOD DOCUMENTATION
People say WordStar’s manual nowadays is better than the past ones, which Personal Software likened to “the Russian-language version of War and Peace.” Don’t memorize even the improved manual, however. Home in on MicroPro’s simple list of WordStar commands, a sheet smaller than a restaurant menu with which I learned the basics.
My WordStar version also included a spiral-bound book with exercises similar to a typing guide, but I didn’t get lost in them. I was too eager to get on with my real work with WordStar.
There’s one other resource nowadays—a tutorial disk, which, because it came only in an IBM-style version, I hadn’t tried as of this writing. Normally, however, I absorb new wisdom better the old-fashioned way: via bound paper.