RE: Menus (not) in Xy4 To: xywrite

[Mike Gawdun mgawdun@xxxxxxxx]

On 11 Oct 95 9:19:07 EDT Tim Baehr/Inso wrote:
>Annie Fisher's post brings up the intriguing (to me at least)
question of why >and whether to use menus. I'm not sure I
disagree with Carl that there's >'nothing' in the menus that
you can't do with the command line, or a little >XPL.

I just wanted to mention that using menus only is a pain and
causes your mouse hand to get stiff at the end of the day. The
real issue is not having shortcut keystrokes so that you do not
have to go to the command line to open a file (this takes
longer). For example, in Word you can use Ctrl + O to open a
file or when you use File Finder you can list all files in a
folder and simply press the enter button on the file that is
highlighted by the cursor to bring it up on the screen. Word
does not bludgeon you with dialog boxes to interrogate you
further to determine if you "really" want to open a file.

The reason this is important to me is that I am required to keep
up with all of the technical literature in my field by
connecting to various bulletin boards in Compuserve and the
Internet to retrieve files for later reading offline. I usually
go through about 150 to 300 files per day looking for useful
information. Having a word processor that easily opens files,
delete read files, and edit files for others to see is very
important to me. I do not have the luxury of learning how to
program XW unless I decide to spend most of my weekends working
instead of having fun outside (now that the weather in Texas has
gotten cooler).

The current version of XW (4.12) doesn't provide an elegant way
to use menus or keyboard shortcuts to open files. It is a step
backward from the previous version (4.11) because it introduced
more dialog boxes which requires more keystrokes or mouse clicks
to open a file. This should be simple stuff folks, I do not
understand why the product was developed this way.
------------------------------------- mgawdun@xxxxxxxx
Date: 10/11/95
Time: 17:11:49
San Antonio, TX
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