Reveal codes was a crutch. There was nothing great about it, no matter how much it's wrapped in a nostalgic haze now. It's basically telling people "we cannot make this wordprocessor work reliably, please code up your text yourself once things go wrong".

And yes, I've used WordPerfect from 4.0 to 7.something on Dos, Windows, various unices and Linux.

> Reveal codes was a crutch.

So do you think the inspector in modern browsers, or "view source" are a crutch then?

I wholeheartedly disagree with this assertion, and there is absolutely no "nostalgic haze" clouding my vision. While I do agree that sometimes pulling up "reveal codes" could have revealed formatting problems caused by a bug in Wordperfect, the difference between WP and MS Word, was that you could actually DO something quick to fix the problem, rather than in Word, where the answer was often "something is royally screwed up -- you get to start over now".

It's a feature I miss every time I use Word.

It's so simple, yet so effective.

Word literally has this. Certainly InDesign.

Word has nothing like it. Word has a filtered view of codes.

WP laid it all bare. Every code and nuance was presented. Nothing was filtered or interpreted. I recovered many a screwed up document that you would just have to redo in Word if it ever got into such a state.

I still miss a real reveal codes in Word.

There was a public outcry for it back in the day and a snotty response from a Microsoft PM - wish I could remember enough details to see if I could find it but I'm convinced MS never really delivered a true reveal codes purely out of spite.

Word Perfect as I recall actually let you directly manipulate those codes though. Think of it a bit like toggling between an edit view and raw HTML.

Personally, I never liked WordPerfect, nor did I use it much. I used a lot of different word processors but mostly ended up standardizing on Microsoft Word (well pre-Windows) for personal use.