I met someone recently that still uses WordStar. Yes I'm serious. He runs it in QEMU on FreeDOS. He's a writer for a living.

George R.R. Martin still uses Wordstar as well!

Sure, there are always exceptions but they're only that, exceptions.

A lot of authors, myself included, want a "distraction free" editor. Its a whole over-populated market segment.

Prose thrives in the terminal. Ice and Fire was written in WordStar, as just one popular example.

Is that why the series ground to a halt

> “I’m 12 years late on this damn novel, and I’m struggling with it,” he said. “I have like 1,100 pages written, but I still have hundreds more pages to go. It’s a big mother of a book for whatever reason. Maybe I should’ve started writing smaller books when I began this, but it’s tough.”

He's averaging a hundred pages a year. Maybe not the fastest, but certainly not the slowest writer. With the size of his books... Cut the guy some slack.

> 12 years late

Seems like people have cut him a lot of slack already. Of course he doesn’t really owe anything to anybody, but at some point he and everyone else has to face the reality - which is that if that book is ever published, it’ll be posthumously, finished by a ghostwriter.

Rachel Kroll once posted that she writes her posts in nano, with the distraction of syntax highlighting turned off: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/09/24/editor/

I can't find the link but I think at some point she compiled her own nano with some "helpful" feature patched out again.