What does HackerNews think of Darkstar?

People can try the emulator.¹

Key to understanding is that GUI operations were two-handed, descending directly from NLS (people have all seen the ‘mother of all demos’², right?). Right hand on the mouse, left hand on the left function key cluster³ — one of the Star papers is explicit that the left cluster was a direct substitution for the NLS/Alto chord set.

A very noticeable difference from the familiar Lisa lineage is Move and Copy vs Cut and Paste — there was no clipboard. (Here I think Star got it right and Tesler got it wrong: the condition of the clipboard containing invisible fragile state is a mode, and a worse one than move-in-progress.)

¹ https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/Darkstar

² https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/209/

³ https://digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/keyboard/

There is an emulator now, https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/Darkstar

On Linux you need mono, nuget and msbuild. I used a recent versions from https://www.mono-project.com/

Then you should be able to do:

    git clone https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/Darkstar.git
    cd Darkstark
    nuget restore
    msbuild

This should produce a Darkstar.exe below D/bin, which you can execute using "mono Darkstar.exe".

On Windows, if you have Visual Studio, then you can just open D.sln and build the project.