“I still use WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS ”

I use WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS, not for any nostalgia or legacy reasons, just because it's a full-featured and highly configurable word processor that I can use in a terminal. I only use it for writing letters and so on, nothing too serious, but I prefer to stay in the terminal if I can.

It works beautifully under dosemu2, which has a terminal mode that can translate various VGA modes into S-Lang calls (S-Lang is like ncurses, so no X11 required). I find this technically impressive and makes a lot of old DOS software indistinguishable from native linux software; stdin/stdout, parameters, host filesystem access, etc all work transparently.

Here's a screenshot: https://twitter.com/taviso/status/1272670107043368960/photo/...

It can import TTF fonts and print to PostScript, which I just pipe into ps2pdf and then handle on the host.

I'm not aware of any other full-featured modern word processor that can run in an xterm. I know about wordgrinder but it's very very basic. You could use a text editor, but it's not ideal for layout because it doesn't understand things like proportional font geometries - you need that to know how lines/glyphs will fit on the physical page when it's printed. You could write it in some form of markup, html, TeX, markdown, whatever, but if I'm just trying to format a document I prefer a word processor.

(Note: dosemu2 doesn't require virtual 8086 mode, so it works fine on x86-64)

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/33cMrnl