> So I'd still love to hear from someone who has the background to do a direct comparison
Can do.
> especially if they prefer WordStar.
I don't. I dislike both WS and Vi.
Vi (and its variants, I am covering all of them here) is a Unix tool. In the 1980s, Unix was big and expensive, and usually ran on boxes so expensive they had to be shared. So, mainly found in academia and research.
WordStar is a CP/M tool which became for a while took that dominance to DOS.
It ran on affordable standalone microcomputers you owned and didn't have to share with anyone else.
What they share is that they are designed for keyboards before things like cursor keys, Insert/Overtype, PageUp/PageDown, Home/End were added. They do not assume theys; they expect just letters, a few shift/meta/ctrl type keys, and nothing else.
So, they redefine all these functions with letters and letter combinations.
So, cryptic, idiosyncratic, hard to learn, but once you learned, fast and powerful. Touch-typists loved them, because your fingers stayed on the home row and you never needed to reach off the alpha-block and into the extra keys. (The ones that are a different colour on the classic IBM Model F and Model M keyboard.)
Vi is the Unix flavour of touch-typist's UI, for those from universities and research and maybe big rich corporations.
WordStar is the DOS flavour of touch-typist's UI, for those who bought or built their own computers and installed and ran their own software on inexpensive machines.
In its time, WS keys were everywhere in DOS. The cracks started showing when WordPerfect took the DOS wordprocessing crown, with its even weirder function-key driven UI, which really favoured the Model F layout (f-keys down the side) and contained built-in copy protection in the form of colourful keyboard templates.
Then IBM CUA came along and mostly swept that away. I was there and using DOS then and I much prefer CUA.
Same functional role, but different commercial markets.
Can do.
> especially if they prefer WordStar.
I don't. I dislike both WS and Vi.
Vi (and its variants, I am covering all of them here) is a Unix tool. In the 1980s, Unix was big and expensive, and usually ran on boxes so expensive they had to be shared. So, mainly found in academia and research.
WordStar is a CP/M tool which became for a while took that dominance to DOS.
It ran on affordable standalone microcomputers you owned and didn't have to share with anyone else.
What they share is that they are designed for keyboards before things like cursor keys, Insert/Overtype, PageUp/PageDown, Home/End were added. They do not assume theys; they expect just letters, a few shift/meta/ctrl type keys, and nothing else.
So, they redefine all these functions with letters and letter combinations.
So, cryptic, idiosyncratic, hard to learn, but once you learned, fast and powerful. Touch-typists loved them, because your fingers stayed on the home row and you never needed to reach off the alpha-block and into the extra keys. (The ones that are a different colour on the classic IBM Model F and Model M keyboard.)
Vi is the Unix flavour of touch-typist's UI, for those from universities and research and maybe big rich corporations.
WordStar is the DOS flavour of touch-typist's UI, for those who bought or built their own computers and installed and ran their own software on inexpensive machines.
In its time, WS keys were everywhere in DOS. The cracks started showing when WordPerfect took the DOS wordprocessing crown, with its even weirder function-key driven UI, which really favoured the Model F layout (f-keys down the side) and contained built-in copy protection in the form of colourful keyboard templates.
Then IBM CUA came along and mostly swept that away. I was there and using DOS then and I much prefer CUA.
Same functional role, but different commercial markets.