Hence the unbelievable popularity of markdown.
Imagine telling your 90s self your current machine configuration and how awesome it is. Then explain that we, with all this tech, voluntarily chose to type in plaintext format, with notations that kind of work as a more readable form of markup language, because we got fed up trying to make WYSIWYG work.
Oh yes, and GUIs are for noobs, pros use terminal emulators, but that’s another topic :)
The thing is I still enjoyed using quality DOS and Unix terminal software.
GUIs are not the one true way to represent a UI. They’re not even new technology any more.
They’re just different and better suited to certain tasks but not others.
It’s like asking why are we still using steering wheels to drive instead of speech recognition?
I also miss extending the supervisor prompt with BBC BASIC and arm26 ASM though :D
I think it comes from conflating layout with writing. In QuarkXPress or InDesign it really isn't an issue. Those tools are quite uncomfortable for sitting to write in, though.
LyX does a decent job of this, I think, though it's not exactly WYSIWYG.
There’s also an issue with black box language vs something like HTML, which has semantic value besides pure presentational function.
I don’t care if the auto generated PostScript is ugly as long as the printed work is perfect.
I would have been easy to convince.
I was forced to use it heavily for a year of pure writing for a previous job. It's incredibly unpredictable. It's like whack-a-mole. You make text in one place bold, and all the sudden some of your footnote text on a different page becomes bold.
The people at that job who were really good knew all of the tricks, digging into the codes that WordPerfect inserts to address various issues. But even then, it was an extra step, and I never became as productive in WordPerfect as I had been in Word.
Plus WordPerfect has been on maintenance mode with Corel for decades at this point, catching lots of bugs and half-implemented features.
Obviously I get this with HTML, but the Mac & MS Word approach of 'object oriented formatting' was just a much better execution for mouse operation.
Word 5.1 on the Mac was amazing. Fast, powerful, probably everything one would need even today, aside from track changes.
Tbqh, this is my experience in just about every rich text editor. Well, maybe not quite that bad, but I’ll always bold a word, and then while editing I have to go back and change the word after it, and it will suddenly be bold.
I wish bold/italics/etc acted like caps lock. It’s either on or it’s off, and the computer doesn’t try to guess for me.
It's starting. Outlook is doing some kind of "autocapitalisation" to me and I have no idea how to turn it off.
Somebody has WordPerfect 8 binaries around.
It requires libc5 - the c library that was common before glibc became common at the end of the 90s. And then needs X libraries that are compiled against libc5.
Probably you could find an old Red Hat 5 or something and pull out those libraries to run on a recent kernel.
docker has no concept of the binaries that actually run, it just sets up namespaces, cgroups and a userspace. worse case scenario, you have to run the docker container as privileged, still no difference from running on host (at least with a properly constructed image, where the binaries wouldn't run as root)
WordPerfect was a great word processor, I remember using version 5.1 for years because it was wicked fast, rock stable, and most importantly, it was predictable. By contrast, MS Word -- even today -- seems to have a mind of its own. You move an image, and suddenly all your numbered bullet points appear in a different font except for the last one, and nothing short of retyping the whole thing in another document seems to fix it.