Mary Matthews, a gifted writer-editor in Chevy Chase, Maryland, favors a WordStar rival called Perfect Writer.
“What a conceited program,” I say.
“WordStar’s a dinosaur,” she shoots back.
In late 1984 we both tried new versions of our pet software (actually WordStar 2000 is more of a successor), and while defending them, we harbor reservations.
First the basics. I myself prefer a program like WordStar Version 3.3, which is in the “get-what-you-see” tradition and shows your copy on screen almost exactly as it will be printed. But Mary makes a good argument for a rival with a different philosophy. WordStar 2000 in fact helps her case. It now has many of the features that her dear Perfect Writer came out with first, including split screens. Interestingly, however, the new Perfect is more useful to the “get-what-you-see” crowd than is the older version, while WordStar 2000 is less get what you see in an important way than 3.3 is. At least that’s true of the WordStar 2000 previewed to dealers. During a demo, anyhow, a MicroPro employee couldn’t coax 2000 into displaying double-spacing conveniently on screen even though we could have double-spaced on paper.
Where does the increasing resemblance between Perfect Writer and the WordStar family fit in the cosmic scheme? I’ll recklessly generalize:
The word processors of the world are becoming like refrigerators; all the deluxe models will have the equivalents of automatic defrosters and ice makers and butter warmers and lettuce crispers. More of the new wrinkles will be marginal. And the surviving companies will be the ones that can explain and exploit the differences and support their customers the best.
Not everyone likes butter warmers. As noted before, WordStar 2000 isn’t an unalloyed improvement for me, and the “perfecter” Perfect in some ways disappoints Mary.
The older WordStar lets you move to the left of a line with the combination of the Control key and the letters Q and S or Control-QS. A touch typist could do this almost instantly. WordStar 2000, on the other hand, uses Control-CL. CL stands for “cursor left,” CR for “cursor right,” and mnemonic commands like those are indeed easier to keep in your head, especially if you use a program only occasionally. On the other hand, the new strokes are harder for a touch typist—this one, anyway. Likewise, Mary wishes that Perfect Writer’s new commands were a bit more logical, especially to old Perfect Writer hands.
Concluding, Mary says Perfect Writer users with 64K machines shouldn’t junk them to buy more powerful computers just to run the new version. My thinking is basically the same about WordStar 2000 versus WordStar 3.3. The older program isn’t as good as 2000 in some cases; for instance, when you could use built-in memo format to make temporary employees more productive. But 3.3 is still terrific for people without such needs, and I’ll think long and hard before I myself change.
Mary’s impressions and mine are typical of many veteran users of software who can’t stomach features added for novices. She’s 100 percent right except when we disagree. As “host,” I won’t rebut her in the places below where we do.
Here’s what she sent over the phone via her Kaypro II:
Somehow, I’m not sure how, I’ve gotten to be enough of an authority on Perfect Writer—the “old” Perfect Writer, that is, the one released in June 1983—that strangers call me up and say that a computer salesman somewhere told them I was the Sibyl who could answer their questions with a local instead of a long-distance phone call. Luckily, the questions usually run in the “How the heck do you do X?” vein, or I might have to reveal that I’m only a good-hearted writer.
Now the Perfect Writer people have released a brand-new version of their already powerful program, and I think I’m in trouble. The new, revised version of Perfect incorporates some radical changes—sweeping enough to demand 128K of RAM (and IBM PC DOS) to operate. (Actually, after claiming that the new Perfect can edit documents of up to 100 pages, the manual states that “with 64K of RAM you will be able to edit documents about 5 pages long,” so I assume that the new Perfect takes up about 56K of RAM—not being familiar with the PC’s way of juggling numbers, I can’t tell exactly.) I’m in trouble because I won’t be the reigning Sibyl anymore unless I can figure out how to buy a PC-compatible computer with a decent keyboard (most PC keyboards are horrid) and still do things like pay bills and buy the occasional loaf of bread and jug of wine.
The most radical of the changes is that the new Perfect Writer now uses what it calls “pop-up command menus” during editing. When you hit the Escape key, a small (about one-twelfth of the screen) “top menu” will superimpose itself over your text, as close to your cursor as possible, three characters away to the left or right. It lists your choices for subsidiary menus, which eventually lead you to the command you want.
Nearly every command has been changed, so that those of us who are used to the old Perfect Writer must learn the editing commands all over again. The new manual (haters of the old one will be glad to learn that the index is now at the back where it belongs and those frustrating Roman numerals are gone) explains with a straight face that the pop-up menus exist so that you “don’t have to memorize command sequences.” Of course, if you plan to use Perfect Writer more than once a year or so, you’re going to memorize the commands, anyway; and so, as the manual airily says, the Control key does everything the Escape key does, identically; the only difference is that you “bypass” the top menu—because, it says, you aren’t always going to want to see it. Mind you, if you use the Control key, you’ll see every menu but the top menu, anyway.
Is this enough reason to change all the commands but one—to bypass one menu?
To me, this is not an improvement over the old Perfect Writer—not unless you actually like added keystrokes. All the old two- and three-keystroke commands are now three-keystroke commands at least, and often four or five. This is progress? The new Perfect Writer has indeed taken pity on us and assigned to the PC’s function keys twenty frequently used commands, so that if, for example, you don’t feel like keystroking Escape-DS-Carriage-Return to save your document and continue working on it (Control-X-Control-S in the old PW), you can keystroke SHIFT-Function Key 9-Carriage Return. Whoopee.
Let us not carp too much about what strikes me as suspiciously similar to kludge, since the new Perfect Writer is as fast or faster than the old Perfect Writer. We’re probably only talking about a few microseconds, mind you, but it still seems to me that the execution of Perfect’s new commands is usually close to instantaneous. This is a thing to marvel at when you compare Perfect Writer to WordStar 3.3, where unless you have a specially speeded-up version with specially reassigned command keys and fingers with a lightning-fast touch, it takes forever to execute certain commands (well, ten or twenty seconds) and perceptible time (say, one or two seconds) even if you do have the speed. But I still say the 50, 100, or 200 percent additional keystrokes are a pain in the you know where. The program may be faster, but the human being is now 50, 100, or 200 percent slower.
One improvement in particular is one to run through the streets singing about: Perfect Formatter has been incorporated into Perfect Printer in the main menu (inexplicably renamed “PSI”), and the two of them together are approximately a million times faster than they used to be. Thank you, Perfect Writer!
For a couple of years now, I have been using Perfect for the long, complicated projects, like books, that demand powerful editing capabilities and Perfect’s special strengths—such as split-screen editing, automatic footnoting, automatic construction of a table of contents, etc. For shorter things, like personal letters, I’ve been using WordStar, for its what-you-see-is-what-you-get screen. The main failing of the old Perfect was whether or not you were using the document design capabilities, you had very little idea of what the final product was going to look like. (The main failing of WordStar, which as far as I’m concerned has been a dinosaur for several years now, is that it can’t do half of what Perfect can—and it does it slowly, too.)
Shout “hallelujah,” brothers and sisters! The new MS-DOS PW allows you to choose between using its old “@@ commands” and having what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Or you can mix the two of them (not that I know why anyone would want to, since with the PC I’m using, you can’t tell when a word’s been underlined).
You can now get on-screen justification if you want it; and if you want to underline a sentence, you don’t have to worry about your on-screen justification being thrown off 4 or 5 characters—you just position the cursor in front of the material you want to underline, go to the end of it, and tell the machine to underline it. The exact command sequence for underlining a sentence is Escape-T-B (begin marking), Escape-F-S (go to the end of the sentence), Escape-A-M-U (underline the marked area). This looks like a lot of work, especially compared with the old PW’s @@ux{}, until you stop and consider what the same thing would be in WordStar. Suppose it’s a ten-word sentence you want to underline: you’d go to the start of the sentence and keystroke something like this: Control-P-S, Control-F, Control-F, Control-F, Control-F, Control-F, Control-F, Backspace, Backspace, Control-P-S.
I’ll break discipline and object to Mary’s description of the WordStar underlining procedure. You could underline a sentence just by starting with one Control-P-S and ending it with another. What’s the big deal, Mary? Your described procedure would apply only to material that you underlined after you wrote it. All those Control-Fs do is make the cursor jump a word ahead. Grrr! Then again, maybe I’m simply a more decisive underliner. I know what I want! If nothing else, this little disagreement shows how work habits influence choices in word processors.
Not only does the new Perfect Writer have the old Perfect’s strengths—split-screen editing of up to seven documents at a time, a zillion powerful editing commands, still another zillion powerful document structuring options—but it’s added a few more just for fun. For example:
◾ The old Perfect allowed you to delete from wherever the cursor is to the end of whatever sentence you’re in; the new one lets you do that, of course, and also lets you cut to the end of whatever paragraph you’re in—or an entire paragraph, if you’re at its beginning.
◾ Now you can delete not only the next word ahead of your cursor but also the word behind it—a small thing but amazingly handy.
◾ You don’t have to delete text before you copy it. (However, the process is more complicated than it used to be.)
◾ You can flush right material on screen—useful for the what-you-see-is-what-you-get feature.
◾ You can more or less paginate on screen—although this instruction is only good for the what-you-see-etc. editing; it’s useless for the document-design mode (@@ commands).
◾ You can use the “Search” function to search not only the document you’re working in now but any and all other document files on your diskette. This strikes me as amazingly handy for editing multiple documents when you can’t remember what the name of the other document is or where the reference is you’re thinking of. For example, suppose you’re writing to Joyce Davenport and you want to add a paragraph from a letter you wrote to James T. Kirk but you can’t remember more than that it was about artichokes. You would invoke “search document”; the prompter then asks you what you’re searching for, and you say, “Artichokes.” Pretty soon you have a list of the documents the word “artichokes” appears in, and you can then call up the one you want for multiple-document editing.
◾ Similar to this is something new the main menu offers: you can compare two files, and Perfect Writer will show you their differences—useful for comparing edited and unedited versions of a report.
◾ If you have a color monitor, you can “paint” the letters and backgrounds of the up-to-seven files you’re working on different colors (eight background and sixteen letter colors), so as to tell them apart. For me, this falls into the “who cares?” category, but some may like it; and I have to admit, you can get some very pretty (though not always easy on the eye) combinations.
◾ Perfect Writer now has the printing option “End at page X.” Shout hallelujah, brothers and sisters!—the new Perfect at long last has caught up with the dinosaurs like WordStar.
◾ Some of our old favorite document-design commands have been renamed, usually for the better. And we have one absolutely dandy new command: @@need. @@need makes sure that there’s enough room left on the page for a chart or similar material. If you’ve just written a 15-line poem that can’t be broken between pages, immediately after the last line of your poem, type in @@need{15 lines}; if there isn’t going to be enough room on the page, your poem will automatically be “forced” to the following page. Hot diggety!
All is not completely rosy in Perfect land. The new Perfect has lost some of the old Perfect’s advantages. For example, the old Perfect had an automatic feature that told you where in your document you were—35 percent of the way through, or whatever. Moreover, the old Perfect had a command that let you know how long the document was in terms of both number of lines and number of characters, and where your cursor was in all this. I’ve searched the new Perfect manual and haven’t been able to find any equivalent new command. The closest I’ve been able to come is a command that lets you know only how many characters there are in the file, not where you are, or anything else; and the command isn’t listed in the index, nor is there any equivalent command that I can find. Great work, guys. This is what I call a major frustration. It’s maybe bad programming, and it’s certainly bad documentation.
The new manual is slightly better organized than the old one, but that’s not saying a lot. I’ve rarely been able to divine the new name for the old command in the new manual, and when I’ve found it, it’s usually been by accident. It would have been an enormous service if the Perfect people had put in some sort of comparison chart for us old-Perfect old pros.
Like the old Perfect, the new Perfect is very cavalier about the number of spaces it leaves after a period or colon; sometimes it’s the two you typed in, and sometimes it magically gets transformed into one. The new Perfect goes the old Perfect three better and is randomly cavalier about the number of spaces it leaves behind a period, colon, quotation mark, question mark, and parenthesis—not only deleting spaces where you do want them but also inserting them where you don’t want them. Instead of mildly annoying, this quirk is now big-league annoying. May whoever thought it up and liked it so much he/she expanded it spend eternity brushing gnats out of his/her face!
You still can’t tell the Search feature to search for something X number of times. For example, if three times you use the word “pishtosh” and want to change it to “nuts,” you can’t tell the search-and-replace feature to “do this three times”—as with the old Perfect, you have to do it twice with the “Ask me” and then “Cancel” the third time and do it by hand, or do it three times and then have Perfect search wastefully through the rest of the document for something you know is not there.
The new Perfect’s printing menu is better than the one the old Perfect came with but not nearly as good as the menu that David Hite developed in 1983 for the old Perfect Writer. The only improvements are the “compare” feature mentioned earlier and the ability to step outside Perfect for a while into Perfect Calc, Perfect Filer, or a telecommunications program—nothing I’d write home about.
We’ve lost the “one word” command—a serious blow for those of us who used it to get around Perfect Writer’s cavalier treatment of periods and colons. This command caused the characters placed within it to be considered one word, so that Perfect Filer wouldn’t split certain words between lines.
Perfect Speller, which is now on the same diskette with Perfect Writer, Perfect Formatter, and Perfect Printer, is much faster than it used to be. Alas, it is just as stupid. Unlike better spelling checkers, Perfect Speller works on the system of prefixes, suffixes, and roots. In other words, if the word “check” is an acceptable root, then “checker” and “recheck” are acceptable. So are “checkment” and “checkation.” And like the old Perfect Speller, the new Perfect Speller doesn’t recognize its own vocabulary—it queried words like “blankline” and “ux,” which are Perfect Writer commands and ought rightly to be ignored. My recommendation is to get The WORD Plus, which can be renamed to be accessed as if it were Perfect Speller and which is far superior.
An interesting—I don’t say terrific—addition to the Perfect family is Perfect Thesaurus. You substitute the Perfect Thesaurus diskette for your document diskette in drive B, position the cursor on the word you want to look up, type Escape-S-T, and Perfect Thesaurus checks its dictionary. If the word is there, you may substitute any of the synonyms for your original word, type in your own replacement, or say “forget it” and go on to look for another synonym. The hype says that Perfect Thesaurus “holds nearly 50,000 words (entries plus synonyms).”
The parenthetical remark is the key one to home in on. I asked Perfect Thesaurus to look up “transform,” and it did; one of the synonyms it offered was “metamorphose.” When I asked it to look up “metamorphose,” it told me, “Word not found.” (Perfect Thesaurus has also never heard of “fanatic,” “asinine,” “pop,” “airy,” “bypass,” “instantaneous,” or “shrug,” among about fifteen others of the forty-five words I tried.) I’d estimate that the average number of synonyms offered for each word is between five and ten—if we compromise and say seven, that’s only 6,000 or so words that Perfect Thesaurus can recognize. Moreover, Perfect Thesaurus can only look up fifteen words before it starts yelling, “No more marks,” and refuses to cooperate any further.
In other words, Perfect Thesaurus is a nice toy, but I question its usefulness for serious writers. Having a copy of The Synonym Finder by your desk offers you about a million words that you can recognize, and is about as fast to use.
The new Perfect Writer itself still has many of the annoyances of the old Perfect Writer:
◾ The automatic swapping feature still cuts in at inopportune moments and makes you wait before you can continue typing or execute a command. It’s now only one second or so instead of five seconds or so, but it’s still annoying.
◾ There is still no automatic indicator showing where you are in your document or how long it is, a feature of every other word-processing program known to humankind.
◾ You still can’t customize the document-design commands (although it’s usually possible to get the look you want if you’ve used Perfect Writer for many years and know some tricks they don’t mention in either the old or the new manuals)—if you want some real customization, tough noogies.
◾ You can still start printing by referencing page and section numbers, but if you want to start with footnote 125, you’re in for a major pain.
The new Perfect is more powerful than the old one, but not by as much as its creators fondly think. After spending two days evaluating the new Perfect for this article, I went home and spent several happy hours with the old Perfect. Oh, I admit I thought now and then, I wish I could cut to the end of the paragraph, or, I wish I could delete the word behind the cursor instead of only the word in front of it—and the old Perfect Writer is indeed slower than the new one (by maybe 5 percent?)—but on the whole I found I preferred two keystrokes to five and three keystrokes to six.
Many of the improvements of the new Perfect Writer fall into the category of kludge: lots of flashing lights and ringing bells and chrome and racing stripes and wow, look at that dashboard! Perfect Writer is still the best word-processing program I’ve ever run across, but for those of you who don’t want to give up your 64K non-IBM PCs, don’t worry: you’re not missing enough to make spending all that money worthwhile.