'Emacs style' delete line shortcut (CTRL/U) doesn't work correctly in Firefox

[Peter Flynn]

On 15/10/18 08:27, Liam Proven wrote:
[...]
> Corel is alive and well. So is WordPerfect which in its Windows form
> is a pretty decent app these days.

That is good news. It was always a better wordprocessor than Word,
particularly for long or complex documents — possibly the only
wordprocessor to create publishable quality...at the time.

> Sadly, its management were both desperate and gullible.

And, one has to add, ignorant.

> And it did a Linux version of the whole WP office suite, by porting it
> to WINE -- it recompiled the whole suite on winelib and then fixed the
> bits that didn't work right.

IMHO that was a mistake. It slowed it to a crawl and introduced
dependencies that it didn't need.

> But then, some gullible idiot at HQ thought that the problems of WP
> Office on Windows were that it didn't have the same style of buttons
> and the same macro language as MS Office. (This, I think, is obvious
> nonsense.)

Same macro language I can't argue with: compatibility was an issue.
Same style of buttons is exactly the kind of thing you can fool gullible
marketing people with, though.

> WP Office for Linux would never have made much money -- few Linux
> users like paying for software -- but it would have legitimised
> desktop Linux at the time. There was no credible office suite for
> Linux back then. StarOffice was both obscure and commercial.

What they failed to understand was that very influential technical
people -- almost all of them with a background in the UNIX/Linux field
-- would have killed for a functioning Linux wordprocessor and would
gladly have been very vocal in praising it. Trashing WP8 for Linux was a
marketing gaffe of the first order.

> But I never personally liked it much. It wasn't CUA-compliant, and I
> found the multiply-overloaded F-key UI to be hard to use. I could use
> it, but I didn't like it.

I actually hated it.

> However, for its time, WP 4.2 was a classic app. Blindingly fast, the
> best printer support in the industry, used everywhere, and powerful.

Rivalled only at the time by PC-Write, whose printer support was equally
good, and it supported proportional-width fonts. But it was shareware,
and businesses didn't understand it.

> WP 5.0 was a big buggy but for many people, WP 5.1 was the classic
> version. I personally preferred it, 

By this time I was using Pandora, the typesetting industry's fork of WP
for DOS, which could Save As...SGML and had the best tables editor in
the business. Plus the marching display of tags in the footer, so that
you knew where in the document you were, structurally. That folded when
Elsevier switched to XML and made their typesetters find software
themselves.
> But an early hero of mine, later a friend, the late great Guy Kewney,
> wrote of WP 5:

Good grief. I remember Guy from his time at PCW, one of the funniest and
most literate guys you could meet. I believe your quote is accurate.

>> They were told in no uncertain terms what to do, and chose to
>> ignore it, alas.
> 
> Well, not AIUI... along with Lotus, WordPerfect Corp was one of the
> 2 big players who bought into the OS/2 dream.

Sorry, I didn't make it clear I was talking about their SGML/XML editor.
Another instance of having a really excellent product and junking it
right at the moment it would have been a killer app. The only other
product to rival that was Microsoft's SGML Author for Word, which,
despite the name, was a conversion program, not an editor. They killed
it just as people started to ask for conversion from Word to XML and
back because it could convert to "real" SGML, not the stuff you find
inside a .docx file these days. But that's a whole other story.

///Peter