Re: Windows-style handling of blocks

[russurquhart1@xxxxxxxx]

Talking about handling blocks of text, i always remember how the old
Wang dedicated wordprocessor, and then subsequently Multimate, a Wang
wordprocessor clone, handled block text selection prior to a copy or
move. Pressing the copy or move key put you in a selection mode. From
there, any cursor movement selected or deselected text. If you pressed a
character key, the current selection was extended to the first
occurrence if the character that was pressed. If you wanted to select a
word you might press the spacebar key. for example. Once you were happy
with your selection you would then press the copy or move key, move your
cursor to where you wanted the block to go and press the copy or move
key again to complete the process.
This was all before mouse's, and i always thought, for myself, that was
an elegant way to handle selection of text. I ended up, with the help of
Robert and Carl, writing a little Xy code to do the selection part!

fwiw,

Russ



On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 3:18 AM, flash wrote:
> Harry wrote:
> ≪Perhaps most of you already know this, but you can modify your .KBD
> file to make Xy4's handling of defined blocks work as Windows does.
> That is, holding down the shift key while using the cursor keys can be
> made to extend or contract the block as in Windows programs. Then, you
> can also do block functions--delete a block by hitting the Delete key,
> MoVe or CoPy it, etc.--all without "closing" the DeFine.
> And none of this interferes with also using the familiar Xy way of
> handling DeFines.
> You can get the Windows-type actions by using Xy4's DM function. If
> anyone is interested, I can post the .KBD modifications. ≫
>
> Would you kindly send me a sample of KBD syntax for this function?
>
> Thanks,
> Flash