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I turned my old laptop into a writerdeck (tinkerbetter.tube)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/peertube@lemmy.world
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I have a hard time with focus, and my job is to write with a computer. So I made a computer just for writing! If you read descriptions for videos, say "Rocky Almadora" in the comments. If you're an...

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[–] 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Thats cool. For now my low-effort version of this is a 25-year-old ELO fanless all-in-one computer running Microsoft Word for DOS and WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS, on Windows XP. There's no network and I use a USB stick to transfer files. The main worry is that the ancient hard drive will crap out, so I keep a second identical computer with the same software running on Windows 2000 as a backup. WordPerfect seems more stable than Word. I tried using Linux but these are very feeble computers and struggle to run even the lightweight distros.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    First time I've seen someone mention using Word Perfect 6.2 in the wild, cool to see!

    You may already be familiar with this, but there's a really chill professor (and previously a writer for the computer mags back in the day, where he would review word processors), Edward Mendelson, who is obsessive about keeping WP 6.2 accessible and usable on modern systems and OS's, regularly updating his web 1.0 site that details how. Might be helpful if your current retro computer ever fails beyond just the HDD.

    For anyone else reading who might be wondering why someone would use an old DOS program specifically; WP 6.2 is extremely stable, visually configurable (editing the colors can make it really easy on the eyes), new enough to support .rtf documents, and is to this day extremely feature complete, even coming with a grammar/spell checker called Grammatik that's still useful and comparable in functionality to ProWritingAid, which costs $200 today, or Grammarly, which uses a subscription model (plus a free tier that likely retains what you put into it to to be used for other purposes).

    There's also a nice Linux port of the Unix WP that runs right in the terminal.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago*

    Thanks for that info! That Unix word processor port looks nice. I'll have to try it. Usually on modern Linux and Windows I just use Obsidian, with a greyish theme that's easy on the eyes. But I like the idea of a terminal-based word processor where I wouldn't even have to start a GUI.

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