XyWrite and XyWin

[Robert Holmgren 72050,3455]

I urge you to browse the last year or so of msgs on the XyQuest Information
Line (ex-Billerica). I think you can still retrieve most of it online but, if
not, I'll zip up an archive for you. My impression is that many of the issues
discussed there (sometimes lengthily & passionately) were not forwarded to your
attention in more than capsule form, if at all. It will make interesting
bedtime reading for you (or would be for me if I owned the store). The issues
relating to the XyWin keyboard and its aberrations were initially deprecated or
minimized by SysOp, but I think at length Jim realized that there are grave
problems -- many more than originally thought (see e.g. msg #9635 and a whole
gaggle of babble preceding). I know little about the innards of Windows, but
my impression is that a Win app designer has a basic choice, to honor the
dedicated (e.g. accelerator) keys or not to honor. What I'd like to see is a
Yes|No switch in XyWin that the user could toggle.

Another repeatedly expressed XyWin complaint concerns the lack of choice in the
screen font used in Expanded and Draft (XP/WG) modes.
 Believe it or not, many of us work almost exclusively in these antiquated
modes (it's much more illuminating to see the underlying instructions, than to
observe their effects -- the difference between Apples and IBMs, as it were).
The current XP/WG font is very hard on the eyes; if I had to select only one
font, my personal choice would have been Courier, but.... When you consider
that the original DOS-based concept of Draft and Expanded modes as "IBM text
modes" is entirely artificial in Windows' wholly graphical environment, it
should be a simple matter to give us some user-flexiibility here. Frankly, I
don't understand why the complete selection of fonts available in Graphics (WZ)
mode isn't also available in Expanded|Draft. Seems to me that the XyWin
designers just unthinkingly imported old pointless concepts in this area.

Lastly, the key attractions of OS/2 are, first, lack of competition in the WP
arena; second, a huge concentration of techies, pros, individualists; third,
the big corporate base. This sounds like XyWrite territory to me.