You'd have to find a suitable editor. For a long time I had a copy of Wordperfect 4.x which I'd fire up occasionally under either DOSEmu or FreeDOS. Among other disappointments:
- I've forgotten virtually all my WP muscle-memory. Vim is where it's at. (I was once quite proficient at WP, but the last time I used it significantly was well over 30 years ago.)
- I find DOS apps tend to play poorly with any screen resolution other than 80x24 or so. I prefer more information density, but even running a console (rather than a terminal app) the experience tends to be subpar.
That said, for someone with familiarity with the apps and not too picky about resolution, that's an option.
> You'd have to find a suitable editor.
You didn't follow the link. You should have.
I built that USB-DOS tool and it contains a wide choice of word processors, from plain text editors with the WordPerfect command keys, to full-on professional tools, plus a choice of outliners and also a spreadsheet for the sort of writer who needs to model stuff -- like Andy Weir or John Barnes, to pick two I rather like.
When I saw this post I immediately thought of WordPerfect.
It had such a pleasant interface for that time.
But yeah, one of the things made me go for vim over Emacs a long time ago was its relationship with touch typing and not leaving the home row with the vim modes.
Learn Vim script the hard way [1], even if you didn't end up writing any actual vim script, was a game changer in terms of understanding the semantics.
[1] - https://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/ was