Perfect Writer is a word processor computer program published by Perfect Software for

CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...

, subsequently rewritten and released as Perfect II by Thorn EMI Computer Software for IBM PC compatible computers. It was written in C and famous for its stability. It was an enhanced version of

MINCE Mince may refer to: * MINCE, an early text editor for CP/M microcomputers * Mincing, a food preparation technique in which food ingredients are finely divided * Ground meat, also known as ''mince'', meat that has been minced ** Ground beef, also ...

, which itself was a version of

Emacs Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

for microcomputer platforms. Emacs itself was too heavyweight to fit within the 64kb RAM limit of most microcomputers. Like MINCE, it included a

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...

based virtual memory system. Along with its companion spreadsheet (Perfect Calc), and database (Perfect Filer), Perfect Writer was bundled with early Kaypro II and Morrow computers, as well as with the Torch Computers Z80 Disk Pack add-on for the BBC Micro and had a list price of . In the UK, it was bundled with the short lived Advance 86B PC (a near IBM compatible). It supported up to 7 buffers, had a character transpose command,

undo Undo is an interaction technique which is implemented in many computer programs. It erases the last change done to the document, reverting it to an older state. In some more advanced programs, such as graphic processing, undo will negate the las ...

, footnotes, and indexing. Its capabilities were very close to that of the dedicated word processors of the day. Perfect Writer's ability to cut and paste between documents open in multiple buffers was an advantage over WordStar. Perfect Writer supported a number of add-on programs, Perfect Speller and Perfect Thesaurus, also published by Perfect Software, along with third party software such as Plu*Perfect published by Plu*Perfect Systems. Plu*Perfect included "D", a dired-like file browser that was deemed "the best of all directory displayers" by

Stewart Brand Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American writer, best known as editor of the ''Whole Earth Catalog''. He founded a number of organizations, including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the auth ...

. Perfect Writer was originally published by Perfect Software. Later versions of the product were developed and maintained by Knowledge Engineering in Austin, Texas. The thesaurus was designed written and maintained by George O. Jenkins, Jr.

References

External links

Text Editors Wiki

{{EmacsNavbox Emacs CP/M software Commodore 128 software DOS software Text editors Word processors Discontinued software