Re: XyWrite and C (in the 21st century)

[Andy Turnbull andyt@xxxxxxxx]

I write for a living too, and I started with xy when I was working
for a magazine. I started with the NY Times keyboard, and my in-house
guy modified is as required, on request. At the start, he told me to
pretend it was a typewriter, and it worked find.
A psychologist once told me that if two people are walking down the
street and talking, if the conversation gets interesting/complex they
will stop walking. The reason is, that frees up more brainpower for
the conversation.
If that's the case, then what about the constant attention you have
to pay when working with modern word processors? I'm working on a mac
now, (today, because I'm writing html code for use on a Unix system
that does not recognize upper case file names) and I always have to
watch out for the little booby traps -- the missed key that make a
paragraph disappear or something like that. If I were doing serious
writing on this, how much of my brain would I be able to apply to the
writing, and how much would I have to devote to the machine?
I have friends and acquaintances, ()mostly acquaintances) who tell me
they are so used to the computer than they don't have to think about
it any more. I guess maybe they're more familiar with the computer
than the two men my psych friend told me about are familiar with
walking.
For what it's worth -- on the mac I find TextWrangler the best
program. If there's a better one I'm all ears.
One advantage of wrangler -- you can choose the line endings you
want, and you can make all invisibles visible. This is a big help
because when I used to move things from the mac's text program to
xywrite, those little hidden booby traps that text put's into the
file would make some stuff disappear in xywrite. In textwrangler,
when I make the invisibles visible, the booby traps appear us red
(colored) upside down question marks.
Just a thought., I write some fairly complex and dense stuff these
days, (samples of my website, www.andyturnbull.com) and I'm always
looking for ways to sort and organize ideas. If anyone else is into
this, I'd like to hear from them.

andy t


On 30-Aug-08, at 12:38 AM, Caballero wrote:


On Wed, 27 Aug 2008, russurquhart1@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> Also, at least on the Mac OS X side, over the past few years, I've
> seen a lot of different and specific wordprocessor being produced.
> While some you see that try and mimic M$ Word, or Open Office, i
> have seen a lot that are specific to writing a novel, writing a
> screenplay, keeping track of bits of information related to writing
> your novel/screenplay, some wordprocessors that mimic the old DOS
> days with the notion being that the windowed environments make it
> distracting when trying to write creatively. I mention this because
> it reminds me of the good old days when Xywrite, Wordperfect,
> Multimate, Wordstar, etc were all thriving as well as a lot of
> smaller specific purpose wordprocessors existed for DOS. There were
> a lot of neat choices back then!
Russ, this is an interesting observation because it suggests that,
appearances to the contrary (a world running on Word, Excel, and a
few other giants), there is still enthusiasm for simpler applications
that do a limited range of things extremely well. Maybe there's a
future in "expert" applications and their satisfactions.

Carlo Caballero
thyrsus@xxxxxxxx