Comment by tablespoon

> I wonder how much of this is a deliberately cultivated form of eccentricity. To be clear, I am casting no aspersions here - use what you wanna use!

Probably very little. My guess is he learned WordStar well, likes it, and is too comfortable with it want to "upgrade."

> Keyboard shortcuts and lack of distracting internet can also be worked around (emacs has a WordStar compatibility mode because of course it does; it even models WordStar's marker system).

Spending a bunch of time and effort to find a new tool that works just like your familiar tool seems like more of a techy thing. A lot of people just take the if it ain't broke, don't fix it approach.

> Sure, this takes a small amount of setup but it's not as if maintaining museum-grade hardware/software is hassle-free either. But using DOS and WordStar _is_ a conversation starter and subtly signals that you're important enough of a writer that your publisher will bend over backwards to accommodate you.

This is apparently a picture of him at his computer, and it doesn't look that ancient: https://imgur.com/a/9PITE

And given that he's a writer, he's publishers would probably be just has happy with an ASCII text file as a Word doc.