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XyWrite II Plus



A member of the list recently sent me a copy of XyWrite II+. My original
was modified for the long-dead Hyperion computer, and won't run on a
"real" IBM. (I paid $300 for the original back in 1984, and have never
regretted it...)

When I ran it on my 133 Pentium the screen seemed oddly sluggish. I dug
around in my attic and came up with my old ($2500) Zenith very-large-lap
top 8088 (with a big 20 Meg hard disk -- wow!) and installed Xywrite II
on it. Oops. The screen was just as sluggish. The move to III seems to
have involved a major improvement in screen writing.  Of all the
versions I have, 3.55,6,7 seems to be the speediest overall, though I
haven't benchmarked them. Anyone else have a different experience?

I'm writing a book of legal/political theory. Each chapter is a separate
file, so no file is larger than about 105K. (Eight chapters roughed out
so far...) I find it rather satisfying to work on the book with XyWrite
II+, III+, IV and XyWin, and on a variety of computers including the old
Zenith, a 286 laptop, 486SL laptop, and two Pentium beasts. No
translations of formats are necessary, since formatting is done by
LaTeX, a pure ASCII system.  XyWrite IV is my home base, and I have
modified the menus to run the LaTeX formatter and viewers. Needless to
say, I have a keyboard file dedicated to LaTeX formatting codes.

There are only two things I would like to see in XyWrite: split window
editing of the same copy of a single file, and on-screen highlighting of
misspelled words. The latter is particularly helpful, given my typing
skills. XyWrite's beep is better than nothing, but I like the visual
reminder.

For those of you who like editors, you might check out WinEdt. It isn't
as speedy as XyWrite, but it can be customized a great deal, and is
*very* actively supported by its author. Would that XyWrite were
similarly supported! Or supported at all, it seems.

Myron