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...