WordStar's "column mode"

Question

I've read that WordStar had a "column mode" which could be useful for making it act as a programmer's editor. But I've not found a clear description (or screenshots) of exactly what this mode was and what it did?

Note - I'm not even sure if that is the real name of the feature, or just a description.

Any half decent word processor has / had a column mode for creating multi-column documents. I don't see how that helps programming editing. Do you mean some sort of fixed width fortranesque editing? — Chenmunka, Jan 30 '19 at 15:00
I'm not familiar with WordStar's 'column mode', but I imagine it is similar to nedit's, where you can select any arbitrary rectangular selection of text to copy and paste. I.e., if you start your selection say 10 characters in from the start of a line, then drag down how ever many rows you want, the selection would not include the first 10 chars of any of the lines. — Glen Yates, Jan 30 '19 at 18:20
@GlenYates Correct except that it was all keyboard driven. No "drag down". Move cursor to row 3, col. 11, ^K N, ^K B, move cursor to row 20, col. 20 using down arrow (^X), right arrow (^D) or any other appropriate key strokes (to jump to end of line, etc. or find ^Q F, etc.) and then ^K K to highlight the block, then move to where you want to move the block and ^K V. etc. — manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact, Jan 30 '19 at 18:36
You can do it in Notepad++ (at least, I'm pretty sure it's the same) by holding Alt while selecting text (either using the mouse or Shift+arrow keys) — 12Me21, Jan 30 '19 at 18:47
@FelixPalmen yes, excellent deduction :) I didn't know what it was but it seemed relevant to programming & data manipulation even today in some contexts, so I wanted to know. — StayOnTarget, Jan 30 '19 at 20:00
Yes, Notepad++ can do it. Occasionally useful for things like converting a tab-separated file to a comma-separated file. — Alan B, Jan 31 '19 at 15:02

score 16 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 18 '20 at 08:29

16

Took me a while to write this and another answer showed up. But submitting it anyway because I am such a huge fan of WordStar and have the keystrokes in muscle memory.

There are a few different features of WordStar that made it work pretty well (for the time) as a programmer's editor. I used it (and NewWord) for many years, and then switched to vEdit. I have programmed vEdit with the WordStar control-codes and used it that way for so many years that it is somewhat of a blur which features were actually native in WordStar/NewWord and which ones were not. (Well, multi-gigabyte file editing is definitely vEdit and not WordStar...)

Non-document Mode

Non-document mode was a key feature of WordStar that most other word processors never had. In non-document mode, there were no formatting codes inserted or recognized (e.g., for bold, italics, etc.), did not wrap lines automatically, and did not set the 8th-bit of characters for internal use. A quick search finds WordStar's Document and Non-Document Modes Demystified which gives a complete explanation.

Column Blocks

I think this is the feature you are referring to. I still use it today in vEdit, which as a programmer's editor quite naturally has such a feature, but I still use the WordStar codes to get to it. WordStar historically used Ctrl-KB to start a block and Ctrl-KK to end a block. Those keys worked very much like clicking on the start of a block in a typical modern word processor and holding shift while clicking on the end - block highlighted and ready to copy/move/delete.

However, if you pressed Ctrl-KN first, then you entered column block mode. In this mode the block is a rectangle instead of a continuous character stream. This is ideal for programming as you can use it to indent/undent, move chunks of data or code around left & right, etc.

edited Jun 18 '20 at 08:29

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answered Jan 30 '19 at 15:09

manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact

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"have the keystrokes in muscle memory" Did you have the urge to press ctrl-K S while writing this answer? – Acccumulation Jan 30 '19 at 19:43
I sometimes do things like that. Particularly, control-Q F to find in many programs - depending on the program it can do anything from nothing at all to Quit... I use control-K S all the time in vEdit - I have no idea what the default key binding is and it is plenty faster than going through the menus. – manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact Jan 30 '19 at 19:47
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Off topic probably, but I've never heard of "undent". Was this terminology in use anywhere? "Outdent" I would recognise. – Mr Lister Jan 30 '19 at 20:04
@MrLister not common but it is out there - Google textutil adjust undent - but if nobody else has then I'd create it as a new word. – manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact Jan 30 '19 at 20:18
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I think I've heard "unindent" – 12Me21 Jan 30 '19 at 20:37
@Mr Lister: outdent is a different thing. Unindent would be OK, although the editors I have at hand prefer Remove indent or Increase/Decrease indents. – Gábor Jan 31 '19 at 00:00
@Gábor Outdent is even in Wiktionary as To indent negatively, bring towards the margin. – Mr Lister Jan 31 '19 at 07:10
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@Mr Lister: that's why it's different. It's another operation that's the mirror of indent. While unindent, that we speak about here, is simply undoing the indent, so that it doesn't result in an outdent, just restores what it was before. (And, actually, we're digressing because column mode isn't about indents at all, it's about copying rectangular sections of text). – Gábor Jan 31 '19 at 08:50

Stephen Kitt · Answer 2 · 2019-01-30T18:58:05.513

WordStar does indeed have a column mode, whose effect is to allow blocks to have left and right boundaries. Usually when you mark a block (using CtrlKB and CtrlKK), the block spans whole lines, with at most the first and last lines being incomplete. In column mode (CtrlKN), the block starts at whatever line and column the cursor is in when you start it, and ends at whatever line and column the cursor is in when you end it. You can then manipulate the column as an object.

For example, this would allow you to select the “Year” column below

Year    Top salesman    Total sales
2013    Joe Bloggs      1000000
2014    Jane Doe        1500000

and move it to another position in the table.

When programming, this is useful for indenting or un-indenting code, or manipulating columnar data as would be common in some programming environments in the past.

Using WordStar has a decent description of this feature.

(For readers used to modern-day column handling in word processors, this has nothing to do with page layout columns. It’s a text-selection feature which you’ll find in many text editors; see for example editors with support for rectangular block selection in Wikipedia’s comparison of text editors.)

I also remember using these codes in a very early version of Turbo Pascal for DOS. — Mark Williams, Jan 30 '19 at 21:00
This feature can be activated in many modern editors (including MS Word) by pressing ALT while dragging the mouse (in Word, the useless “research this” feature can interfere with this, if you don’t move the mouse fast or cleanly enough). — Euro Micelli, Jan 31 '19 at 14:20

John Dallman · Answer 3 · 2019-01-31T14:06:18.627

Well, since I mentioned it, I'll illustrate it. I'm told that this is not unique to WordStar: Borland Sprint had it, and so do several modern text editors (I've been using Emacs with folds for the last 25 years).

Say you have some text like this:

           Production by year
       Foos   Bars  Blats  Spungs
1975      4      7     20      3
1976   1000      2     23      1
1977   3000      1   1537      0
1978   5000      4  20331      0
1979   4875    321  38145      0
1980   4900    450     37      0

This is not using a column formatting feature like a modern word processor. These are just characters on simple lines of text, in a text file. They are necessarily monospaced text, because CP/M, which WordStar was designed for, had no graphics.

Now, you want to change the order of the columns, in this text file. It's a fiddle. However, if you have column mode, you can select, say, the Bars column, which looks like this on the screen:

           Production by year
       Foos   *Bars*  Blats  Spungs
1975      4   *   7*     20      3
1976   1000   *   2*     23      1
1977   3000   *   1*   1537      0
1978   5000   *   4*  20331      0
1979   4875   * 321*  38145      0
1980   4900   * 450*     37      0

Then you put the cursor at the start of the Spungs column, and use the Block Move command (not separate cut and paste commands, they hadn't been invented yet), and you get this:

           Production by year
       Foos   Blats  Bars  Spungs
1975      4      20     7      3
1976   1000      23     2      1
1977   3000    1537     1      0
1978   5000   20331     4      0
1979   4875   38145   321      0
1980   4900      37   450      0

Yes, this is far more primitive than you might do with a modern text-processing tool, or with spreadsheet columns embedded in a word-processor document. Retrocomputing, remember?

WordStar's "column mode"

3 Answers3

Non-document Mode

Column Blocks