You only had to memorize a handful of keystrokes to learn WordStar. ^K and a menu would pop up. With WordImperfect, if you lost the keyboard template, forget it. You couldn't do anything. Who ever heard of F3 F3 for help. And to edit anything, you had to reveal codes. I had to use WP at one job and hated it.

WP did steal the market because of WordStar keystrokes. It stole the market because it supported hard drives and sub directories long before WordStar.

>I had an illegal copy, along with an illegal manual my young acolyte in the home office had duplicated by an "understanding" copy shop in the Chicago loop. It was so cool to have a word processing program at all but I still have flashbacks about the weird keyboard combinations to accomplish routine tasks. ^KK, ^KD, etc.
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>Then WordPerfect came along and took the market away. And its UI was even wackier. It was pure rote memorization. No wonder users were so loyal, having gone through so much pain and suffering to be able to use the product at all.