Very early in my career I made friends with the business’s sole Lotus Notes administrator, "the email server guy." He was pretty proud of what it could do, and I sometimes get nostalgic for the admin UI.
I don't have any nostalgia it, I just appreciate how thoughtfully it was designed for data-input efficiency. I actually ported the official UNIX version of 1-2-3 to Linux a few years ago, I still use it regularly. It uses some tricks to get the original UNIX binaries working on Linux: https://github.com/taviso/123elf
I had been thinking about how to add UTF-8 support, it only supports LMBCS (Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set) by default. It's actually worse than that, it stores everything internally as LMBCS but in a lot of cases can only display ASCII, so it transliterates a lot of characters (e.g. é -> e).
It's also possible to run the real DOS version in dosemu - in terminal mode it's basically indistinguishable from an ncurses application, although dosemu is just cleverly sampling the framebuffer and translating it on-the-fly.
I started this project because I was nostalgic for Lotus 1-2-3, but I really really really loved WordPerfect. I'm afraid of starting that project, however, as it might take over my life :) I used to use WordPerfect 5.1 on a 386 PC to edit my school newspaper with multiple columns, graphics, custom fonts, etc. No WYSIWYG, just the power of Alt+F3 (Reveal Codes)!
As a big fan of WordPerfect on my first DOS machine (286 clone), I agree. I respect authors like GRRM for sticking with WordStar, but whenever I get nostalgic and wondering about WordPerfect in DosBox, I remember I use emacs and typst. All the good things about WordPerfect, but vastly superior.
I keep seeing ads for expensive "writerdecks" that run between $500 and $1200 and have a bare-minimum OS that is intended for distraction-free writing. I keep wondering how these are any better than an old laptop, FreeDOS, and WordPerfect 5.2, except as Veblen goods.
It's an incredibly useful piece of software for data wrangling and exploration.
Most notably:
https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im
Has been in HN often, most recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662658
New takes: https://github.com/zaphar/sheetsui https://github.com/garritfra/cell
I don't have any nostalgia it, I just appreciate how thoughtfully it was designed for data-input efficiency. I actually ported the official UNIX version of 1-2-3 to Linux a few years ago, I still use it regularly. It uses some tricks to get the original UNIX binaries working on Linux: https://github.com/taviso/123elf
I had been thinking about how to add UTF-8 support, it only supports LMBCS (Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set) by default. It's actually worse than that, it stores everything internally as LMBCS but in a lot of cases can only display ASCII, so it transliterates a lot of characters (e.g. é -> e).
It's also possible to run the real DOS version in dosemu - in terminal mode it's basically indistinguishable from an ncurses application, although dosemu is just cleverly sampling the framebuffer and translating it on-the-fly.
I wrote a display driver to make that work a little better: https://github.com/taviso/lotusdrv