Console or terminal text editor ala emacs or WP51

[alvaro]

Hello, as I have fully migrated from MSWin to Linux, I am testing the various word processors and offices suites. But I am a nostalgic fellow, and I miss the feeling of good ol' Word Perfect 5.1. I know there are tons of console or terminal based text processor, like emacs, but I wish to hear some words of advice before trying the hundred of packages out there. I am very interested in something the most similar to WP51, in commands, features, etc. Emacs gave me a lot of learning work, and have not too much time for that right now. Many thanks!

[jasonlambert]

If your looking for a full blown word processor, try "Open Office" or "Star Office", they are amongst the most popular office suites with editors for GNU/Linux.

Jason

[scientica]

I join the choir, OpenOffice is one of (if not) the best office packs for linux, howerver for some reason (don't know, how it just ended up that way) I use Gnumeric as my spread sheet. Haven't had mych of a trouble opeing old Word docs in OO, not more problems than opening a word doc on any other machine with another printer/printer settings

[fingal]

I also would like to add my voice to the approval for Open Office. I don't do much word processing at home, but ver. 1.1 is very good. If I want to casually play around with text though, I use Vim or GVim (much the same but with a nice front end). The learning curve is less steep than with Emacs, but each to their own

[alvaro]

Well, thanks, but OOo and the like are not what I'm looking for. What I really want is a text processor like Wordperfect 5.1, as already said, that is, blue screen, white letters, no mouse... etc. Is not for make customers letters or reports to the boss, its just a ... how do you say "capricho"? Maybe Vim could serve that purpose, will check that out.

By the way, its just me or OpenOffice is SLOOOOOW?

[Mark_Alfred]

Hello. Yes, I find OpenOffice.org to be quite slow. It's a huge program. Likewise, I find Abiword a bit slow too.

Anyway, the only programs that I can think of that are somewhat similar to WP51 are nano, or pico. They are both text editors that are run in the terminal. Pico is a part of the email program pine, whereas nano, which is based on pico, runs on its own (and has a few more functions.)

Neither nano, nor pico, come anywhere close to having the same functionality of WordPerfect 5.1, unfortunately. WP51 allowed for document merging, tables, underlining, bolding, italics, footnotes, etc. It did basically what most word processors do today, but used a fraction of the computer's resources to accomplish these tasks. And did it faster. Less is more, as they say.

Latex (or tetex-latex) has the same functionality, but is extremely complicated (and, therefore, not recommended). The closest is probably emacs, and it's a nightmare to understand. It does have a tutorial, though.

There doesn't seem anything in the middle of nano and emacs, I'm afraid, for non-gui word processors.

The other thing to try is installing and running WP51 under dosemu.

[KenJackson]

If you still have your WP51 distribution, use it itself under Wine. I haven't tried that particular program, but I find that most console programs work well. You can get a binary distribution of Wine for most propular Linux distributions here.

Alternately, here are some instructions for getting WPDOS running under DOSEMU under Linux. I'm skeptical, but there it is.

Failing that, try joe. It's one of the many console text editors avilable which is probably included in your Linux distribution. Unfortunately it doesn't have a WP mode, but it does emulate WordStar when executed with the 'jstar' command.