The curse of choices.

The design of X Windows includes the mantra "Mechanism, not policy." This belies the academic roots of the design. I'm using "academic" here to principly mean "isolated from reality." As a result, its interface is wildly confusing and inconsistent. Sometimes within single applications.

The design of WordPerfect seems to be somewhat different. The emphasis was on editing documents. "Word Processing" is the term that is often applied to it. As a result, its interface was simple and direct. It would show words, and offered commands for performing different actions on those words.

One of these interfaces worked really well for its purpose, the other is still in use.

It's sad, really, which one.

What's the real difference between them?

X Windows seems to have been designed with the idea that someone else would come along and figure out what a user might want to use it for, figure out how the user would best interact with it, and build interesting functionality on top of it.

Here is a good description of how truly wonderful X Windows is. Notice the bit where they mention the three buttons that could do just about anything depending on, well, just about anything. Since nobody ever decided how the thing should be used, the poor helpless users were left to crawl through a mess and figure out something on their own.

WordPerfect, in contrast, was designed to make a PC operate much like a dedicated word processor. It would really only do word processing, but that was ok, because that was a lot of what computers were used for at that time.

F7, if I recall correctly, was to print. What if I don't print that often? Well, tough luck. F7 prints. It really does make good sense, though. What else would one do with a document in 1992? Post it as a webpage? Hardly! Print that sucker. Then stick it in a file, or envelope, or something. The WordPerfect Corp. took the time to study the use cases, and design an effective interface--one that made users' common tasks easy and effective.

Actually, for all I know it might have been possible to change key bindings in WordPerfect. I never felt the need, or even the desire.

And that, my friends, is a mark of a well designed user interface. It may be possible to (gratuitously) change it, but nobody ever finds out. The designer has to work harder to come up with sensible choices for everything. But the user is spared that burdon. Isn't that generally why computers got built in the first place? To make tasks easier?