TextPerfect

TextPerfect is a tribute to LetterPerfect, the word processor for DOS that WordPerfect Corporation released in 1990.

LetterPerfect was the lighter sibling of WordPerfect 5.1. It kept the parts most people actually used: the clean blue screen, the function-key commands, Reveal Codes and the one-line status bar. It left out the rest. TextPerfect brings that experience to the Mac as a native app, with an 80 × 25 character screen, the classic blue and grey colours, and the familiar keys. It adds the conveniences you'd expect today, like the mouse, the clipboard, drag and drop, and printing through macOS.

Why I made it

My wife used to work at WordPerfect. Back then I had a Toshiba T1000 laptop with a blue LCD screen, a single 3.5" floppy drive, no hard disk, and a little memory set aside as a RAM disk. I wanted LetterPerfect on it, so I stripped out every file it didn't need and compressed the EXE files with PKLITE. The whole thing fit on one floppy, and it worked. Yay me!

TextPerfect is that little blue-screen word processor again, this time on my Mac.

Built with Claude Code as an AI pair programmer. The idea, testing and nostalgia are mine.

Download

Get TextPerfect-1.1.zip from the Releases page. Unzip it and drag TextPerfect into your Applications folder.

It runs on any Mac with macOS 12 or later, Apple Silicon or Intel. It's signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens normally with no security warning.

TextPerfect isn't affiliated with, or endorsed by, WordPerfect Corporation or the current owners of WordPerfect and LetterPerfect. It's a fan-made homage.

Screenshots

Reveal Codes	Spell check
Reveal Codes (Opt-F3 or F11) shows every hidden formatting code.	Spell check (Opt-F1) offers lettered suggestions, LetterPerfect-style.

The launch splash (F9 brings it back)

Features

The classic screen

• An 80-column, 25-row text screen in white and grey on blue, scaled to fill the window at any size.
• A WordPerfect-style status line: Doc 1 Pg 1 Ln 1" Pos 1". Your line and position are in inches, and the Pos reading turns bold, underlined or italic to match the text at the cursor.
• Page breaks drawn across the screen: a dashed line for an automatic (soft) break and a double line for a hard page break.
• A launch splash screen that fades out after a few seconds. Press F9 to bring it back.
• A built-in key reference. Press F3.

Text formatting

• Bold, italic and underline, which you can turn on and off as you type or apply to a selected block. Bold text shows as bright white, as it did on a DOS screen.
• Center line, which centres a line between the margins.
• Indent, which moves a whole paragraph in by one 0.5" tab stop each time, wrapped lines included.
• Hard page breaks with Ctrl-Return.
• Reveal Codes, which splits the screen to show the hidden formatting codes ([Bold], [bold], [Undrln], [Italc], [Center], [→Indent], [HRt], [HPg]) and lets you delete them directly. Deleting one half of a pair, like [Bold], removes its partner too.

Editing

• Insert and Typeover modes.

• Block: select text with the keyboard, Shift-arrow keys or the mouse, then cut, copy, delete or format it.

• Undo: up to 200 steps.

• Search forward and backward, ignoring upper and lower case.

• Replace, either all at once or one match at a time with a Yes/No prompt for each. One Undo reverses the whole Replace.

• Spell check (Opt-F1), in the LetterPerfect style. TextPerfect works through the document from the top using the macOS spelling dictionary. At each unknown word, the screen splits, with lettered suggestions in the bottom half:

  • Press a suggestion's letter to use that word.
  • 1 Skip Once skips this occurrence.
  • 2 Skip skips the word for the rest of the check.
  • 3 Add adds the word to your macOS dictionary.
  • 4 Edit lets you type the correction yourself.
  • Esc stops the check.

  When the check finishes, the status line shows the number of corrections and the document's word count, e.g. Spell check done: 3 corrections, 1,204 words. One Undo reverses every correction from that check.

• Insert Date, which types today's date, e.g. "November 2, 2026".

• Word-wrapped text at 10 characters per inch between your margins. Tab moves to the next 0.5" stop.

Files

• Drag and drop:
  • Drop a text file on the window to open it.
  • Hold Option while you drop to insert the file at the drop point instead.
  • Drop a file on TextPerfect's Dock icon to open it, even when TextPerfect isn't running.
• .lp documents keep all formatting. TextPerfect is the default app for .lp files, so double-clicking one in Finder opens it.
• .txt files are saved as plain text. Formatting codes are dropped, indents and centred lines are padded with spaces, and hard page breaks are written as form feeds.
• Opens any plain-text file in UTF-8 or Latin-1, with Mac, Windows or Unix line endings. TextPerfect appears in Finder's Open With menu for text files.
• Retrieve inserts another file at the cursor, as in WordPerfect.
• A "Save document?" prompt before anything would lose unsaved changes.

Printing

• Prints exactly what you see on screen: the same line breaks and the same page breaks.
• 12 pt monospaced type at 10 characters per inch and 5 lines per inch on 8.5" × 11" paper, with 1" top and bottom margins and 45 lines per page.
• Left and right margins can be set in inches (defaults 1" and 0.5"). TextPerfect remembers them between sessions.

Function keys

Key	Action	Opt + key	Shift + key
F1	Undo	Spell check
F2	Search forward	Replace	Search backward
F3	Help (key reference)	Reveal Codes on/off
F4	Indent paragraph	Block on/off
F5	Open file		Insert date
F6	Bold on/off		Center line on/off
F7	Exit		Print
F8	Underline on/off	Italic on/off	Margins
F9	Show splash screen
F10	Save		Retrieve file at cursor
F11	Reveal Codes on/off
F12	Block on/off
Insert	Typeover on/off

Ctrl-F2, LetterPerfect's own Spell key, also starts a spell check if you turn off the macOS shortcut that uses it (System Settings › Keyboard › Keyboard Shortcuts › Keyboard › Move focus to the menu bar).

Tip: On most Mac keyboards, F1–F12 control brightness, volume and so on by default. Either hold fn with the function key, or turn on System Settings › Keyboard › Keyboard Shortcuts › Function Keys › Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys. Mac keyboards without an Insert key can switch Typeover on and off from Format › Typeover On/Off (Cmd-T).

Other keys

Key	Action
Ctrl-Return	Hard page break
Tab	Move to the next 0.5" tab stop
Esc	Cancel a block selection, or cancel a prompt
Opt-Left / Opt-Right (or Ctrl)	Previous / next word
Cmd-Left / Cmd-Right, Home / End	Start / end of line
Cmd-Up / Cmd-Down, Cmd-Home	Start / end of document
Page Up / Page Down	Up / down one screen
Shift + any movement key	Extend the selection
Opt-Delete / Opt-Forward Delete	Delete the previous / next word
Ctrl-End	Delete to the end of the line

Menu shortcuts

Shortcut	Action	Shortcut	Action
Cmd-N	New	Cmd-B	Bold
Cmd-O	Open	Cmd-I	Italic
Shift-Cmd-O	Retrieve into document	Cmd-U	Underline
Cmd-W	Close	Cmd-E	Center line
Cmd-S	Save	Shift-Cmd-M	Margins
Shift-Cmd-S	Save As	Cmd-R	Reveal Codes
Cmd-P	Print	Cmd-K	Block on/off
Cmd-Z	Undo	Cmd-T	Typeover on/off
Cmd-X / C / V	Cut / Copy / Paste	Cmd-F	Find
Cmd-A	Select all	Cmd-G	Find next
Cmd-;	Check spelling
Cmd-Q	Quit	Opt-Cmd-F	Replace

Edit › Insert Date and Format › Indent are also in the menus.

Mouse

• Click to place the cursor. Drag to select a block.
• Scroll with the mouse wheel or trackpad.
• Click or press any key to dismiss the help screen or the splash.

Building

You need macOS 12 or later and Xcode or the Xcode Command Line Tools.

./build_app.sh            # builds TextPerfect.app in this folder
./build_app.sh install    # also copies it into ~/Applications
./build_app.sh release    # also notarizes it and makes TextPerfect-<version>.zip
open TextPerfect.app

The app is built universal (Apple Silicon and Intel). The version number is set at the top of build_app.sh. The script signs with the Developer ID certificate named there if it's in the keychain, and otherwise signs ad hoc, which only runs on the Mac that built it. release needs a notarytool keychain profile named TextPerfect-notary. You make it once with xcrun notarytool store-credentials.

The screen font is JetBrains Mono NL if you have it installed. Otherwise TextPerfect uses Menlo.

To change the app icon, replace Icon.png and rebuild. make_icon.swift regenerates AppIcon.icns from it automatically.

Project layout

File	What it does
Sources/TextPerfect/ScreenView.swift	The editor: keys, mouse, drawing, files, search, printing
Sources/TextPerfect/Model.swift	Formatting codes, line wrapping and pagination
Sources/TextPerfect/PrintView.swift	Prints pages exactly as they appear on screen
Sources/TextPerfect/AppDelegate.swift	Window, menus, Dock-icon file drops
build_app.sh	Builds, signs and optionally installs the app
make_icon.swift	Makes the app icon from Icon.png

LetterPerfect and WordPerfect are trademarks of their respective owners.