Anyone ever see WP source code, or maybe an open source clone project? Many aspects of WP (mostly the reveal codes) is still useful (much like markdown), that I'm surprised that an up to date open source app isn't available.
* WordPerfect Editor for DOS -- that was freeware back in the day. Runs in DOSemu.
* WordPerfect 3.5 for classic MacOS. Can be emulated on a modern Mac.
* WordPerfect 8.x for Linux. This is a graphical X11 app, the last version of an abandoned product line. I've blogged on how to install it, and someone posted my blog post and direct links to the install scripts above.
Because it's a living product, I suspect it's not legally feasible to clone it. Its owners might well sue.
n.b. since this is marked as "dedicated to the public domain" on the release website, I wonder whether it would be legally permissible to disassemble these versions, produce listings, and use them to produce a FOSS cross platform descendant (keeping in mind the usual issues around trademark law)
... a good point was made in the comments: Borland's Sprint had a very good emulation of the WordPerfect UI, as it also did of WordStar, MS Word, and others.
Sadly for Borland, its amazing emulate-any-other-UI feature came out just around the same time that CUA came along and forced all the DOS apps to harmonize their UIs onto a common standard.
The other killer feature of Sprint was the continuous background saving -- also foxed by DOS getting disk-caching as standard right around the same time.
Saying that, it remains an important app.
AIUI underneath, Sprint was based on an EMACS clone.
Mark of the Unicorn -- still trading, remarkably -- wrote MINCE (MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs) and the separate SCRIBBLE text formatter.
MINCE + Scribble evolved into PerfectWriter. That did quite well in its day; I tried it on a BBC Micro with a Torch Z80 2nd processor.
PerfectWriter evolved into FinalWord, again quite a success in its day. I've read several books written entirely in FinalWord.
Borland bought FinalWord 2 and renamed it Sprint.
ISTM that if the text-formatting part were outsourced to Pandoc or something, or some monstrous Electron thing, the UI and continuous-save parts of Sprint could be re-implemented in GNU Emacs if someone had the will to do it.
ErgoEmacs is a good start on the UI front: forget emulating WordPerfect etc. today. (Maybe provide WordStar keystrokes for the grumpy old gits.) Just put a _good_ CUA UI on Emacs, and give it the ability to handle basic, Markdown-style formatting, and a continuous save and live wordcount feature, and I suspect a lot of people would be interested.
