L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility • Hacker News Board

Re: L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility

#21

Post by devilbunny » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 3:48 PM UTC

somat wrote: post #19

duane1024 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)!

Reveal Codes is a good start, but if I remember correctly they were read only. you could not close the loop and enter codes. Reveal codes in a small way made me swear off word processing for good. We had an office document in wp 8 or 9 if remember correctly, you know the type, it lived on a shared drive and whoever needed to make changes did. anyhow it was a complete mess, internal corruption all over the place, no c…

Ami Pro 3.1 was WYSIWYG with reveal codes. You could move the tags around, though I don't recall if you could enter them directly. Also happened to have the best WYSIWYG equation editor I've ever used.

Not the most stable software in the world, but I loved it. It made writing lab reports as a chemistry major so much simpler (especially combined with ChemDraw).

Re: L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility

#22

Post by CTOSian » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 3:50 PM UTC

tswq wrote: post #11

Doesn't seem as useful as visidata. Will check out though! Looks like a fun weekend project :)

yea visidata light years , I still use 123R2 runs fine under msdos runner - old version I know but I have a hack of addins :}

as for that project .. well not even windows binaries there

Re: L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility

#23

Post by kcartlidge » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 8:05 PM UTC

duane1024 wrote: post #4

create_accounts wrote: post #2

It would be great to have a terminal compatible Wordperfect alternative, like in the MS DOS days. Can you use Vim to edit documents for printing?

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)!

If asked, I often name WordPerfect 4.2 as the best software I ever used. And that it was written in assembly is incredible.

The book Almost Perfect [1] details those early times at WordPerfect.

Incidentally, amongst the other best software I'd be tempted by Lotus 123, DataEase 4.53, Turbo Pascal 3, and Elite (BBC).

[1] http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml

Re: L123: A Lotus 1-2-3–style terminal spreadsheet with modern Excel compatibility

#24

Post by duane1024 » Mon, May 04, 2026, 1:56 AM UTC

taviso wrote: post #16

Hey, another 1-2-3 nerd :) 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…

I love your pages, they are really great, especially the one about reverse engineering the display driver to discover that 1-2-3 actually supports better display resolutions.

I've been running the DOS version in DosBox-X for Mac at the moment to ground l123 in the reality of what using 1-2-3 was like. I'm using Release 3.4a, which was the last version that didn't go full GUI (R4 for DOS was kind of a Windows-light version). I'm trying to balance fidelity to the original with something that might be useful to actually do some productive work in, especially when one might not need or want the full GUI/overhead of Excel or (shudder) Google Sheets.