Re: #3 in Guardian Tech today, bare metal editors over Microsoft Word

[Kari Eveli lexitec@xxxxxxxx]

Myron,

I started with NB3. I soon realized its potential as a program that
could be reorganized to do things your way. It took me some time to get
rid of NB3's original menus that were written for another kind of user.
It took me a couple of years more to try to rewrite the menus for my
purposes. Finally when I took hold of this task, I noticed that they can
be rewritten quite easily (more easily than their Xy brethren in my
opinion) and that they yield good results. Fundamental routines that
were unsatisfactory (like SAVE that had an odd backup file system) could
be completely rewritten.


Old versions of XyWrite or NB were much easier to use than Signature,
Xy4 or NB4 or later iterations. The difficulty of command-line versions
is just a myth (just like the difficulty of DOS), it is the menus and
other (printer and formatting) refinements that have added complexity
and made these programs more difficult. Indeed, when I purchased the NB4
upgrade, it soon became clear that this program is not modular in the
sense NB3 was. I could not change screen colors at will, it was
difficult or nearly impossible to dismantle unwanted components or
reduce formatting codes to a minimum. I soon quit trying.


The XyWrite 3 way was different from, say, DOS Word which had a rigid,
albeit good, menu system and ample warnings about losing edits when you
tried to quit without saving. E.g. the Xy AB command is maybe a bit
dangerous if you are not aware of its true nature. But saying that
issuing commands like SA, CA, AB is difficult or syntactically complex
is just ridiculous. Or that XPL programs are more difficult to make or
understand than contemporary Word macros is simply untrue (at least
using an XPL formatting aid like my Compile utility). At some level
XyWrite was one of the simplest programs to use, and still is.


I know that in this we Xywriters may differ, but I think the Xy3
generation products qualify best as bare metal editors.


Best regards,

Kari Eveli
LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
lexitec@xxxxxxxx

*** Lexitec Online ***
Lexitec in English: http://www.lexitec.fi/english.html
Home page in Finnish: http://www.lexitec.fi/

> Interesting.  I started using XyWrite with version 2+, and don’t recall
> it being particularly unfriendly. But, of course, I actually read the
> printed documentation from start to finish. The reveal-codes view made
> it easy to find and correct formatting problems, something that became
> increasing difficult with many other programs.