... 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.
Also good on SSI/WordPerfect Corp/Corel for putting old releases out there for free.
In case anyone read my Register story on this: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_...
... 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.
But that isn't what the Emacs folks want.