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Text-Console Based Word Processing? 59

Posted by Cliff from the would-typewriters-be-too-old-skool dept.
chipperdog asks: "I am looking for an activly maintained console based word processor, similar to what one could find with Appleworks, from the Apple // era (Prodos 8 version, pre-//gs), or even one comparable to DOS versions of WP and Microsoft Word. An open-source one that compiles and runs in Linux would be best, although it would be nice to find one that could run on a 486DX2 50MHz with 8MB. A Google and Freshmeat search only turned up editors that seem to lack some of the necessary word processing features I am seeking. Although I mostly use VI (and *TEX when necessary), some no-so-geeky end users need the quasi-WSIWYG interface."
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Text-Console Based Word Processing? More

Text-Console Based Word Processing?

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  • Vi (Score:5, Funny)

    by Trusty Penfold ( 615679 ) <jon_edwards@spanners4us.com> on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @05:32PM (#4654161) Journal

    Although I mostly use VI

    Try Emacs.

    • Just use LaTeX (Score:2, Informative)

      by figlet ( 83424 )
      Why not just use LaTeX? It is great! It is better than OpenOffice (flame-bait??). Sorry. It is all I need. Why should I use some MS-Word wannabe?? ;-)

      Nothing beats TeX quality formating. I use it to do my hair as well.

      • Re:Just use LaTeX (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Jon-o ( 17981 )
        If there was a console version of lyx, I'd be very happy. As it is, the X requirement makes it frequently unusable, though it is my WP of choice, and what I usually end up using.

  • ... but vi + nroff/troff worked for me 15 years ago.

  • Good luck... (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by joto ( 134244 )
    Why are you even asking about this? You know it doesn't exist! Run DOS and WP and be happy!

    • Re:Good luck... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by toybuilder ( 161045 )
      Hrmph. I think joto got the short stick from moderators...

      I think he's right -- it used to be that console based WP's were popular because it required less resources and ran much faster than GUI WYSIWYG WP's. But that was back in the days when console-mode VGA ops were still magnitudes faster than rendering the same text on the graphics-mode VGA.

      Times have changed -- with HW acceleration, gobs of memory, and 2,000 MHz PC's (with much faster execution clock counts), there's just no market (community) need for new WP's to be text-based.

      What's wrong with WordPerfect? There has been Linux, DOS and SCO versions that could certainly run fine on a 486.

      With new Linux PC's selling for $200 at Walmart, it's hard to believe someone would take poverty so seriously as to try to make do on a 486 *and* try to run the latest linux.

      Of course, maybe I'm missing the original poster's intention. Maybe he's homebrewing an uber-Tandy-Model-100 using recycled 486 parts and a FLASH drive... And he intends to have a 40x12 LCD as his console... But I somehow doubt that...
  • RPM here. [rpmfind.net]

  • Clearly, (Score:1, Funny)

    by 3-State Bit ( 225583 )
    You're hindered by the fact that you use mostly vi.

    If you (and your end-users) want a wysiwyg editor, go with emacs.

    There's the ball rolling...

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @05:49PM (#4654336)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • WordPerfect 8 for Linux (?) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ThinkingGuy ( 551764 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @05:57PM (#4654413) Homepage
    As I recall, the Linux version of WordPerfect that was available as a free download a few years ago, had a console mode as well as a GUI mode. I can't say for sure, since I never could get it to install :)

  • groff (Score:3, Informative)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:04PM (#4654468) Homepage Journal

    has what you need.

    It has a legacy stretching back further than TeX and is used for man page formatting on tty devices.

    You can format the output to higher resolution devices if you wish. There's even some work afoot to make it output html, which I think has a lot of potential for helping me to stop worrying about my MANPATH

    • Re:groff (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Matthew Weigel ( 888 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @09:26PM (#4655886) Homepage Journal

      Some people think that "legacy stretching back further than TeX" is not a "win".

      These same people might question why you are suggesting that something "used for man page formatting on tty devices" should be used for printed documentation.

      Of course, such people clearly don't know the power of groff (for those people: try printing man pages out, and you'll see that it handles paper copy very well), but you're not exactly selling it.

      And really I would recommend (La)TeX because I think it's more usable (closer to "what you see is what you mean" than roff); but if someone doesn't want to use TeX, I would recommend looking to modern-day roff users for information on using it: Plan 9 [bell-labs.com].

      • Groff's main weakness compared to the current troff is a complete lack of Unicode support. What happened is that the groff author went to a lot of effort to give Groff iso-8859-1 support. Unfortunatly, he lost interest in Groff (which I don't mind; I do not feel that writing free software should make you a slave to that software for life) and the FSF had a heck of a time finding a maintainer for Groff.

        Now that Unicode is slowly catching on, there is a need to give Groff Unicode support. I do not think that Groff's current maintainer is interested in doing this; it is a lot of work and the need for it is not perceived as being that important. In fact, this is a free software project in the works: Give groff real Unicode support.

        Perhaps it is possible to port the current Troff (with unicode support) to Unix.

        - Sam

  • Like three years ago I came across a LyX [lyx.org] (the WYSIWYG-frontend for TeX) developer at a LUG who claimed that somebody of them is developing a vt100-based terminal version of LyX... I am not sure if this yielded any results, but maybe you can search the LyX lists for that or contact the developers...

    Probably a worthless because outdated info that I am giving, but such a thing would really be interesting I think, and it's a nice deigital urban legend anyway... :)

    • actually, LyX is a front end to LaTeX (which is a font end to TeX (which is a front end to DVI/PDF/HTML/...))

      you can use lyx from the command-line to compile lyx files, don't know anything about a vt100-lyx though.

      • The poster mentioned tex. The poster doesn't seem to be looking for tex, but something WYSIWYGish. Like WP for DOS. It's very possible that someone could write a front-end or analog of LyX that worked in the terminal rather than in X, generating LaTeX and then PS or PDF.

  • Rats. (Score:4, Funny)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:23PM (#4654603) Homepage
    Rats drown in Wordstar.

    (An old palindrome)

  • heh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BigBir3d ( 454486 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @06:30PM (#4654656) Journal
    I was remembering back in the day of Wordstar, lo and behold it [com.com] is a add-on for Word 97/2000! We are talking functionality of those classic keystrokes!

    Another interesting page [glinx.com].

    Using linux, I prefer joe over vi. Any idiot (that would be me) can use joe.

  • I've found that it is not realistic to teach the average user to use Vi or Vim or Emacs. I've had some success in configuring Vim to work with the WordStar/Borland control-key editing commands, but I'm not finished. I'm interested in finding others who want to do this too.

    • Re:Wanted: WordStar/Borland control-key commands (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @07:58PM (#4655391) Homepage

      Joe, Pico, and Jed have major shortcomings, I found. Vi and Vim and Emacs have commands that were designed in the days of 9600 baud terminals.

      There is a big misunderstanding about "Word Processing". It is two separate processes: 1) Keystroke capture and initial formatting, and 2) Final WYSIWYG formatting. I use Ventura Publisher version 5 for number 2 because Corel made mistakes in the later versions of Ventura Publisher that made Ventura useless to me.

      Microsoft Turd ^H^H^H^H^H Word is useless to me because it is so quirky. Also, it doesn't have on-screen kerning (after all the many versions!).

      It's amazing. There are hundreds of editors available, but none that finish the job. I wish that all of that work had gone into just a few editors, or only one. It seems that many programmers make an editor or a compiler as part of their self-training. (I wrote a compiler for HP data acquisition equipment.) Very few of those efforts are ever finished.

      I really need open source. That way I'm protected from events outside my control. MicroStar International, makers of WordStar, stopped being a competitor when Mr. Rubenstein, the CEO and biggest stockholder, died of a heart attack.

      Open source software and world standards are the only answers. Suppose Bill Gates becomes unavailable for some reason? Would anyone else have an interest in the Visual Basic programming language (which is itself programmed in C++)? If not, all those who chose that language would suffer.
      • Open source software and world standards are the only answers. Suppose Bill Gates becomes unavailable for some reason? Would anyone else have an interest in the Visual Basic programming language (which is itself programmed in C++)? If not, all those who chose that language would suffer.

        Now consider what would happen if something horrible, heaven forbid, were to happen to Bjarne Stroustrup. What would happen if the inventor of C++ were to mysteriously vanish off the face of the Earth? I, for one, would not lose interest in C++, by any means. Doesn't seem like many people would, as so very many things depend on C++. Your example with VB is a good one. The same could be said for Java, etc.

        Perhaps this would be a good ask Slashdot: "Interpreted Programming Languages, and their Supporting Languages... your thoughts?"
  • The Joe editor has much of the look and feel of the class-era word processors. The first time I ran it, with that friendly menu taking up about the top four or five lines (visible command options are a MUST for light users) it reminded me a lot of the old Wordstar from CP/M.
    • Joe offers basic line/word wrapping functionality, and the JSTAR option offers basic Wordstar key-commands.

  • wordperfect for SCO? (Score:3, Informative)

    by hatless ( 8275 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @08:52PM (#4655689)
    Maybe the old 5.1 or 6.x versions of WordPerfect for SCO Unix will work even on modern Linuxes. There's an old HOWTO. Check Google. Some DOS word processors like WordPerfect, XyWrite and the like might work under emulation, but getting a SCO one wotking wouldn't feel like emulation when it comes to things like navigating the filesystems, running multiuser, and using colors to signify formatting over terminal emulation.

    I'm not sure "non-geeky users" are going to be keen on any console-mode word processor, no matter how capable it is, though. I guess you know your users best.

  • Try VDE (Score:2, Informative)

    by netringer ( 319831 )
    VDE [punky.com] by Eric Meyer is an amazingly fast and powerful, RAM resident editor written in Assembler. Take a look and see if it meets your needs. VDE would perform well on a 8086 class PC with minimal RAM

    The main limitation of VDE is file size. Because it loads the entire file into a page of memory, VDE can only work with a file of up to 64MB in size. To get around this limitation VDE is designed to easily work with files split into smaller chunks.

    You could run it over FreeDOS [freedos.org]or UNIX.

  • PC-Write? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lumpish Scholar ( 17107 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2002 @09:00PM (#4655747) Homepage Journal
    There was an MS-DOS shareware product -- in fact, it was the product for which the word "shareware" was coined, and by a guy who'd been Microsoft employee number 9, no less -- called PC-Write. It was a lightweight (fit on a floppy), blindingly fast (even on an original 4.77 MHz 8088) quasi-WYSIWYG word processor. I tried it, I paid for it, I used it a lot. With a little care, you could do fairly close to WYSIWYG editing of plain ASCII files.

    The author (Bob Wallace) passed away September 29, 2002. His company is long gone, as is the company his product was sold to.

    It looks as if you can download version 3.04 here [umich.edu]. Halfway down this page [simtel.net] you'll find version 4.15. The Pascal source code was available at one point; it's probably disappeared.

    A similar product, "Breeze Word Processor," appears to be available here [theabsolute.net]. This [google.com] is a four year old (to the day!) Netnews discussion of lightweight MS-DOS word processor packages. Your very best bet might be an MS-DOS or Windows 3.x version of WordPerfect or Microsoft Word.

    None of these are actively supported.-(

    In this day when people lightly port Sim City and Civilization to PDAs and phones and web browsers, it shouldn't be that hard to recreate one of these.

    P.S.: What OS is your 8 MB system running?

    • Re:PC-Write? (Score:2, Informative)

      by chipperdog ( 169552 )
      I'm running Linux, Slackware distribution version 7.1, 2.2.18 Kernel, with the full glibc (not the u one mentioned in another /. article), installed via zipslack, using a rescue floppy with unzip.
      Works quite well, even X works fine, although some local X apps get slow, it works fine as a remote "X-terminal" across a ssh tunnel.
      Mostly work in Virtual Consoles though. I usually have Lynx runnning on one (usually reading /.), Pine in another, Tac (an AIM client) in another, VI or JStar in another, (depending on if I'm programming or writing a letter), and maybe an ssh session in another. Fetchmail, Sendmail, Cron are running in the background.
      I have lynx configured to show image links so I can see images with SEEJPEG using SVGALIB.The only time I notice any slowdown in the system (other than running X appps) is when PINE is sorting my mailbox (It is getting large), or Lynx in rendering a >200k webpage, or when SEEJPEG is decoding an image.
      The only reason I ask the question is because my wife uses the computer also and is doesn't like the current editors. I remember some good word processing packages back (15-20 years ago) in my Apple // days (Appleworks, MouseWord, MouseWrite, and few others whose names leave my mind), and there seem to be none of those (text mode ones) left. I tempted to run an Apple // emulator and run some of those (if my media is still readable).
      I should try PC-Write in FreeDos using DOSEMU. It may be what I'mm looking for.
      Of course, I could just buy a new computer, but what fun would that be

      • Re:PC-Write? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Quinn ( 4474 )
        I fondly recall geeking out all night playing with the Appleworks database (cataloging my paper route customers, videotapes, and comic books), then writing wierd fiction in the word processor after filling my head with Tales from the Darkside and Friday the 13th: The Series.

        A straight port of Appleworks to *nix console would be great. I was a much more productive writer when I was staring at a green monochrome screen waiting to receive my words -- without the distraction of a web browser, instant messenger, xterms with MUD/MOO windows open...
  • Did you consider groff/troff and then nenscript? It isn't WYSIWYG but can serve your purpose anyway.

  • No no no. You just don't understand. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Webmoth ( 75878 ) on Wednesday November 13, 2002 @02:10AM (#4657265) Homepage
    Everyone keeps suggesting text editors. Text editors are great, but they are NOT word processors!

    Word processors give you functionality that text editors don't. With a word processor, you can define the paper size, the margins on the paper, as well as things like fonts (Arial, anyone?), kerning, justification, etc. ad nauseum. Even more, word processors generally have printer support, so you can submit a print job from the program instead of the command line, select the printer you want to use, even manage print jobs.

    A word processor lets you put multiple columns on a page. A word processor lets you embed images in a document.

    Show me a text editor that has all these features and I'll show you a word processor. Yes, there *were* console (read: non-graphical) word processors that could do this. As the parent says, like WordPerfect and Word for DOS.

    So why doesn't the parent use WordPerfect or Word for DOS? For one thing, they are hard to find. For another thing, they cost money. For a third thing, it would be awfully nice to have an open source one.

    Next time read the parent! If they say "word processor" don't suggest "text editor!"
    • "If they say 'word processor' don't suggest 'text editor!'"

      I know you really tried to form a distinction between the two, distinctions that are probably clear in your mind, but both text editors and word processor have been gaining features in the past ten or twenty years and lo and behold: they overlap!

      It means you can't expect an advanced text editor to not have the features an advanced word processory has. And vice-versa. It also means that the question itself is vague--when he is asking for a word processor what set of features is he looking for? Since he wants it to be console based surely he isn't looking for an editor that inserts graphics (which GNU Emacs 21 can too BTW). But anything else is speculation really.

      I'd suggest him to install a large GNU/Linux distribution and start trying out programs that are described as either text editors OR word processors.
    • Could you use Tex or SGML and have layouts to convert to whatever format you need.
      A text editor is good enough for SGML or TEX and the formats support everything you could do in a word processor (and probably more).

      EMacs may have addons for Tex and SGML
    • Good points.

      How about writing docs in HTML? I know Bluefish uses GTK, anybody else know a good HTML editor that runs in Text mode?
      .
  • I use Joe for word processing for one reason: it's CTRL-K-J command that reformats entire paragraphs for you. I use VI for everything else though. VI sux for word processing though because it does not wrap your text inserting newline characters for you when you type past the end of a line and if you do it yourself adding text to the middle of a paragraph is a bitch. That's why I use Joe for wordprocessing.
    • To wrap lines as you type: :set wm=6

      To reformat a paragraph:
      !}fmt

      To reformat a paragraph in vim without needing fmt:
      gq}
  • Protext---the text-based word processor that was originally released for the AtariST, Acorn, and Amtrad PC---is still available for sale. See http://home.btconnect.com/tigerteam/protext/ [btconnect.com] for more info. There isn't a Linux native version, but it is a light-weight MS-DOS program that should run under the appropriate Linux-hosted emulator.

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