This is exactly the type of project I would love to do to my 2017 27" iMac Retina 5k. It's getting a bit slow, so I would love to salvage the beautiful screen and drive it with a new mini. But alas I can't find any similar kits like the Juicy Crumb Docklite.
I have one of the first 5K iMacs from 2014. I contemplated doing a similar project but I don't really want to destroy a perfectly fine computer. It doesn't run the latest OS, but it still runs the latest Chrome though. I often use it to SSH into a more powerful machine for coding, and I occasionally use remote desktop.
If Google decides not to support this for Chrome, I'll firewall it from the internet but still plan to use it as an SSH machine.
It does feel like a native Mac app and is quick and responsive. Is there a way to modify the key hotkeys to be like Total Commander? At this point I don't want to have to learn another set of keystrokes. I briefly looked at it and hit space to select a few files, and it opened them, and then I hit Cmd+D to get a quick directory and instead duplicated the file. So it seems that a key mapping from us old commander users must have been done by someone.
I think you can, it has a pretty powerful configuration editor. I wasn't specifically looking in TC-like config, because Far hotkeys are hard-wired in my brain and I felt that they are mostly the same in Marta.
Well said and that about covers it for me. Once you learn the commands, there is very little thinking needed to traverse the file structure, picking/moving/modifying files, synching and comparing, all at blazing speed. It is the first app I add to any OS I'm working with.
I use DC on Mac and TC on Win. One of the problems with Mac DC is that the key reassignment don't use the standard Mac Control, Option, Command keys. They do map to the Win equivalents of Ctrl, Alt, Win keys but not always. And trying to override the Mac's almost hard key assignment of the F1-F12 keys is problematic.
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.
While MS Word does have Reveal Formatting, it is really not a good replacement for Reveal Codes. It's a clunky way to see isolated formating for a short portion of text. For example, how to search for all places in the text for a font change, or margin change, or section format change. It's difficult to also show where certain formatting starts or stops.
Under WP, you can instantly scan the entire document looking for those changes. Not so with MS Word. That being said, RF is better to compare 2 sections of text to immediately show their differences.
