WordPerfect

Raised as a usability problem by 17 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2011–2026), in 16 threads.

People raised many different problems with WordPerfect, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 16 complaints

Rather clunky UI compared to MS Word for DOS, the commenter says2026-06-09
Function keys give no hint of their action, so they are hard to learn2025-04-01
Setting paragraph styles requires playing with tags, not just setting the style and typing2024-07-02
Modal editing makes switching between adding and modifying text terrible2024-06-27
Input lagged so badly on a 386 that typing was unusable even in an empty file2023-10-25
Hitting one key on the terminal dumps you to shell and loses unsaved work2023-01-11
Unclear whether ordering gives a license or just replacement disks2020-11-01
Bold formatting unpredictably spreads to unrelated text in other places2020-09-09
Formatting toggles stack, so bold must be turned off as many times as it was turned on2020-02-17
Program feels clunky to use in its interface2019-07-03
Interface looks weird and counterintuitive to new users familiar with standard Windows2018-12-27
Users must learn hidden formatting codes and it wasn't WYSIWYG, so it's hard for non-techies2016-07-18
Menus hard to navigate, and things behave buggily2014-08-12
Custom printing driver system is very confusing and breaks other Windows programs2014-08-12
Without a cardboard key template, the function-key commands were almost impossible to use2014-05-12
Keyboard F-commands were moved into menus, which didn't suit mouse-driven Windows use and frustrated staff2011-11-23