Rereading this for the nth time, what strikes me is the emphasis on the keybindings, and not on the conceptual model of what a document or writing is.
Other editors like Emacs or vi have clear paradigms: in Emacs, everything is a buffer of text, manipulated by Lisp functions, and everything flows from there (eg. a keybinding is just a way to invoke a function); in vi, everything is a keystroke which does an action, and the point is to make a sequence of keystrokes do as many actions as possible (and even the modality is there mostly because there's not enough keys on the keyboard). But WordStar as described seems to have no particular idea: interactions past the typing sound like a grab-bag of features with no unifying concept, bolted on one by one by user demand & implementation ease.
The emphasis is easy typing. One notes that most of the discussions seems to come from fiction writers. Perhaps that is a commentary on the poor support for fiction writing by the tools then - it didn't matter that WordStar didn't offer you much beyond what, say, nano + a lightweight markup format like Markdown offers you. At least it didn't get in your way while typing out your latest medieval action scene or SF space opera. And simply being fast and relatively transparent was enough to make it a winner back then. "It doesn't do much easily or well, but at least the basics are reliable and they are very fast both to type and to see onscreen!" Then adding on more ad hoc features doesn't scale well, while compromising what made it so usable in the first place.
But that also explains why for all the nostalgia, you don't see a modern WordStar making much inroads anywhere. Because you can do better now, even for fiction writers - look at Scrivener, which has been enthusiastically adopted by so many writers. Just looking at the homepage https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview you can see the Scrivener paradigm: hierarchical outlining, rendered more attractive to non-programmer audiences like book writers, with modern affordances, and taking advantage of modern hardware capabilities. What would WordStar have to offer to an author who has learned to use Scrivener? Nothing, really.
Other editors like Emacs or vi have clear paradigms: in Emacs, everything is a buffer of text, manipulated by Lisp functions, and everything flows from there (eg. a keybinding is just a way to invoke a function); in vi, everything is a keystroke which does an action, and the point is to make a sequence of keystrokes do as many actions as possible (and even the modality is there mostly because there's not enough keys on the keyboard). But WordStar as described seems to have no particular idea: interactions past the typing sound like a grab-bag of features with no unifying concept, bolted on one by one by user demand & implementation ease.
The emphasis is easy typing. One notes that most of the discussions seems to come from fiction writers. Perhaps that is a commentary on the poor support for fiction writing by the tools then - it didn't matter that WordStar didn't offer you much beyond what, say, nano + a lightweight markup format like Markdown offers you. At least it didn't get in your way while typing out your latest medieval action scene or SF space opera. And simply being fast and relatively transparent was enough to make it a winner back then. "It doesn't do much easily or well, but at least the basics are reliable and they are very fast both to type and to see onscreen!" Then adding on more ad hoc features doesn't scale well, while compromising what made it so usable in the first place.
But that also explains why for all the nostalgia, you don't see a modern WordStar making much inroads anywhere. Because you can do better now, even for fiction writers - look at Scrivener, which has been enthusiastically adopted by so many writers. Just looking at the homepage https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview you can see the Scrivener paradigm: hierarchical outlining, rendered more attractive to non-programmer audiences like book writers, with modern affordances, and taking advantage of modern hardware capabilities. What would WordStar have to offer to an author who has learned to use Scrivener? Nothing, really.