Re: Some additional cursor moves

["Olson, Timothy" timothy_olson@xxxxxxxx]

>Eric Van Tassel asks whether he is "the only person who has
>found that
>Ctl+right/left arrow, though indispensable, can be
>inconvenient when you
>want not the next/previous word but the space/punctuation
>*before* the
>next/previous word?"

>Not at all. I have assigned the same key sequence he uses to
>the ctrl-shift right and left arrows. They are among the
>customized keys that I use most of all when editing. It is
>surprising how much time they save if you want to add an
>"apostophe s" or change "negotiate" to "negotiating." [N. Sivin]

Yes, I've found this ability very useful too. I have it assigned to
Shift+[left/right arrows] (whereas I have Alt+[left/right arrows] for
jumping to the beginning of the word). In addition to the uses N. Sivin
lists, it also saves keystrokes when adding commas.

BTW, since I'm also very familiar with Word (thanks to having researched
a now-aborted attempt to make that our word processor), let me say that
one really annoying quirk about Word is that when moving a word at a time
it treats any punctuation as the start of a word. Thus, while the above
additions to XyWrite would not be needed, the function in Word is
annoying because it lands your cursor in inconsistent places (at the
start of a word if there's no punctuation, at the end if there is
punctuation). This quirk also makes it nearly impossible to duplicate
XyWrite's RW (I have it on Alt+Delete), which I make VERY heavy use of,
along with its counterpart, PW, RW (which I have on Alt+BackspaceDelete.)
I say "nearly impossible" because it involves a screen-long macro, and
then I still get unsatisfactory results when encountering parentheses.
Just another example of XyWrite's superiority to Word.

Timothy Olson
Editorial/Technical Assistant
Tyndale House Publishers
(630) 668-8310
(630) 668-8311(FAX)
Timothy_Olson@xxxxxxxx