A look back: WordPerfect on DOS (2023)

An interesting thing about WordPerfect was that most of the keyboard shortcuts were built around the row of function keys at the top of the keyboard, so they were difficult to remember, compared to modern keyboard shortcuts. For this reason, nearly every WordPerfect user I knew had a little piece of plastic or laminated paper that they placed above the row of function keys that listed all of the keyboard shortcuts on it to help them remember.

The shortcut strip came in the box! And it was all based on F1-F12 and modifier keys alt/ctrl/shift. It was a complete pain to learn, but once you knew a few key ones (F10 was save?), it was very fast to work with. I wasn't very old, but I remember having the same kind of muscle memory then with WP5.0/5.1 that I do now with vim. Autosave wasn't a thing, so hitting F10 often was just done out of habit.

But, by far the best part was that you could reveal all of the formatting codes, so you could see exactly how something was styled. It was much like editing HTML by hand, and easier to figure out how something was styled than with almost any WYSIWYG.

Here’s a photo of what it looked like: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1aemcxc/80s_word_perf...

Losing Reveal Codes was the worst part of Microsoft forcing Word down everyone's throat. Word positively sucks in comparison to this day. No, the little "paragraph" icon isn't enough. Reveal Codes showed you in granular form what was going on so you could fix what was borked, instead of ping-ponging back and forth in AutoComplete hell.

And it wasn't just on the DOS version. WordPerfect for Windows has/had it too along with the modern WYSIWYG UI.

The function keys were no more difficult to use than any other key shortcut. However since keyboards had that space they put the chart there and so could find the less commonly used commands. Everyone quickly learned which key was save, but there were many many others that they didn't use and so they didn't know - but if they wanted it they could look at the chart and find it.

GUIs are more discoverable (when done well), but DOS didn't really have a GUI option, so this was a second best. VI and emacs users sometimes print shortcut charts as well.

WordPerfect shipped with printed templates/overlays and a wonderful printed manual.

There weren’t any standard key combinations yet…except maybe Wordstar?… because word processors still had very very low adoption and many many users spent all day in WordPerfect so there was a lot of muscle memory.

Back then software was optimized for expertise not casual use…and priced accordingly. WordPerfect was about four hundred 1980’s dollars a seat, not 99p in an app store.

Most modern keyboard shortcuts are mnemonic such as Ctrl-S for Save, which makes them easier to remember than function keys.

Assuming you speak English.

At some point OpenOffice decided that the shortcut to save was Ctrl-G because my locale was set to Spanish ("guardar").

I don't remember the details, but the function key shortcuts changed enough between WP4.2 and 5.1 to slow me down. May have been the first time I grumbled about a SW update breaking my workflow. Some things never change.

> function keys were no more difficult to use than any other key shortcut

That's a bold statement. I think most users would disagree, and the voted with their feet/fingers, and UI designers seem to agree.

Why? Some guesses: Nothing about F# indicates what it does, making it hard to learn; ctrl+S makes sense. And after you learn it, few can touch type function keys which means, 1) you have to look away from the document and, 2) there's much less muscle memory involved.

ui designers moved graphicics for good reason. conrotl-s makes sense - now what is the shortcut that makes sense for any of the other thousand things someone wants to do in word processor? There will always be some that don't make sense.

Using F-keys for the most shortcuts was standard across DOS apps. As far as discoverability, the common UI pattern was to show a single row of function key labels on the bottom of the screen (and update it when the user pressed and held Shift/Ctrl/Alt to allow for combinations), often with an option in settings to hide it once the user has gotten accustomed to the shortcuts.

I don't recall any issues touch typing F-keys, either, especially on typical keyboards from that era which had the entire row split into groups of 4, making it easy to find the right key without ever looking.

I'm not sure what you mean by "much less muscle memory involved" wrt F-keys. I still, to this day, have muscle memory of F2=save from using Norton/Midnight Commander so much.

OS and hardware designers seem to agree function keys were a good idea. And have extended them as one click short cuts for brightness, airplane mode, opening your calculator, and all other kinds of things.

Might be true for saving, but there are far too many shortcuts. What makes it easier to remember that Ctrl+X is cut and Ctrl+V is paste?

Ctrl-S is for search !

Reveal Codes made learning HTML so easy for me back in the day. It was the same idea, just different codes.

Ctrl-X for cut because scissors form an 'x' if you squint hard enough?

Me too! I have shared this point with several people over the years and none understood this. I guess I was a WordPerfect nerd.

Also Ctrl-V looks like 2 pieces of paper being pasted together.

I see you. There are dozens of us!

> Using F-keys for the most shortcuts was standard across DOS apps.

That doesn't make it a good idea. In UI design, people don't say 'we're using this because it was used in 1980s DOS programs'.

You may find it to be fine - I don't mind function keys, but I they aren't nearly as efficient. But we're talking about the general public.

Better options didn't exist. Wordperfect was expected to work on a 4mhz computer with a low resoluion screen and be fast. f keys or contorl shortcuts - both were not good options but given the constraints fkeys are better - f keys had a place to put your cheet sheet.

I'm not criticizing WordPerfect, though I wonder why they didn't use accelerator keys and the keyboard (e.g., ctrl+s) - or was that an option in WP?

Regardless, my point was that their keyboard UI wasn't as efficient as Vi. WP still made the right choice - no way the general public was learning Vi!