Reclaiming Alt keys in XyWin

[Myron Gochnauer GOCH@xxxxxxxx]

Doug complained about loss of the Alt keys to Windoze. I haven't
noticed any loss to Windows itself (expect Alt-Tab, which can be
turned off). The standard XyWin keyboard does, of course, make
heavy use of Alt key combinations to access the menus. Doug had
used these for French accents previously.

Two solutions come to mind:

1) Why not use the floating accents of XyWrite? -- S1, S2, etc.
They work very nicely and are quite intuitive if you put them on
the right keys. (By the way, the keyboard function called XX
which allows you to define other floating accents does not work
with XyDOS --- it crashes the program --- although it works with
XyWin.)

2) You could reclaim the Alt keys by moving the entire Alt key
tables in the keyboard file to another key. If you don't use it
all that often you might put it on function key F3. Just define a
new table with something like "Doug=61" in the keyboard file just
below the lines like "ALT=56,98", "SHIFT=42,54", etc. Then go
down and change "TABLE=ALT" to "TABLE=Doug". You can then create
a *new* TABLE=ALT table with your normal accented characters in
it.

Yes, believe it or not, you *can* use F3 as a control keys
without losing its use to select or define text. I created a
keyboard table called SELECT and attached it to F3 (as a control
key) in my keyboard file. Now if I hold down F3 and press S the
sentence under the cursor is selected, F3+P selects a paragraph,
F3+W selects a word, etc. I did this because I just couldn't
remember the normal keys for these functions. I've put a variety
of other functions into the SELECT table as well. If I *don't
hold F3 down* while pressing another key, it works like F3
normally does: Begin/end select, etc. I think this can be done
with the other function keys as well. It works with XyWin and
XyDOS.

Myron