Re: Sporadic problems with *.KBD defs under OS/2

[Robert Hemenway robhem@xxxxxxxx]

At 07:47 PM 12/15/98 EST, Robert Holmgren wrote:
>** Reply to note from xywrite@xxxxxxxx Mon, 14 Dec 1998 09:23:26
>
>I guess I forgot to say _why_ you might wish to change the TABLE names.
>The reason is, that ALT and CTRL and SHIFT are keyboard metaphors
>recognized by the system. What you want to do is stonewall the system
>completely: give it zero recognizable information, so that XyWrite's
>keyboard controller retains complete control over your actions.

>Robert Holmgren

I second Carl's Grazie! Hooray! Changing the names does it. (Made mine
CLEO, ART, SHANA, and CARY, adding all the permutations as you advise.
Makes for an nice, comfy menage a quatre.)

Dropping in the NI *throughout* was not a good idea. Unshift 51 wouldn't
produce a comma when it read *51=ni,,* I haven't taken the time to go back
to see what others keys were thrown askew or why the ALT keys were acting
up. Just went back to the earlier KBD and changed the shift-key names on
that.

I *knew* you'd renamed those keys in your KBD file--you mentioned it months
ago--but I didn't/couldn't get the point then. Many, many thanks.

A thought for the day:

Tools, Eric Gill said, were means of helping a man to make a thing;
machines were means of making which had to be helped by the man. "If you
are responsible for the form and quality of the thing made, then whatever
apparatus you use is a tool rather than a machine. And as that
responsibility diminishes, so the apparatus becomes more and more a machine
until the point is reached when, as with the latest automatic machinery,
the machinist has no responsibility whatever."

To put it another way ? a tool is an instrument of precision because it
enables the user of it to do precisely what he intends with the particular
work in hand; it serves, as his bare hands could not, his idea of the thing
to be made; it can be adapted to the individuality of the material. A
machine may seem an instrument of precision; it is not one, for it cannot
enable its user to approach more closely his own idea; it can only force on
the material a shape invented by someone else without reference to the work
in hand.

(This is from an essay on Gill by Walter Shewring. Gill was writing 60 or
70 years ago.)

That's the difference between XyWrite, which was designed to be a tool, and
the products that dominate the market--which are meant to be machines. The
managers who buy the products *want* machines. They're simpler to control.
Or so they think.

Regards,

Robert Hemenway
robhem@xxxxxxxx