Those of us of a certain age will remember WordStar. It was the first hugely popular “word processor” and was used by almost everyone who wanted to write prose of any sort. It was the default word processor in the MS-DOS world and perhaps even for CP/M. It was mostly replaced by Word Perfect and Microsoft Word and faded into obscurity. I used it for a long time and wrote several articles with it.
Although those days are long gone and my memory is dim, I’m pretty sure that writing in Org mode is better. You have the same formatting that WordStar provided and you don’t have to worry about its proprietary file format.
Still, it lives on as the preferred writing platform for writers such as George RR Martin and Robert J Sawyer. I’m pretty sure that Martin continues to use MS-DOS just so he can have WordStar—that’s real devotion to an app.
Sawyer, on the other hand, isn’t giving up on WordStar but would like to live in the modern world. He has resurrected WordStar to run on modern systems albeit with a DOS emulator. That’s a road too far for most of us, of course.
But why go there? Professional writers are notoriously crabby about their writing platform. They want whatever they’re used to and don’t ever want to change. I love the process of writing in Org but professional writers don’t want to think about their platforms: they just want to write without thinking about the software they’re using.
That’s too bad because
- Emacs/Org mode has a clean, easy to learn interface, and
- Emacs is not going to be abandonware like WordStar. It’s going to be around for the foreseeable future.
Of course, some mainstream writers such as the recently deceased Vernor Vinge do use Emacs so perhaps others will join in.