Re: XyWrite's future - NB 10 or something different?

["Carl Distefano" cld@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from Bill Troop  Sun, 08 Mar 2015
00:54:03 +0000

Bill,

> the one thing I would love in the VDOS environment is a fully
> working JUMBO. - - Any news on that? It seems unfair that there
> is something in VDOS which gives JUMBO trouble - - and it seems
> that the VDOS people ought, if they can, to work it out.

BigEdit is about the only thing in U2 that does not work properly
under vDosXy. If you're aware of anything else, please report it here
and I'll try to address it. In any event, I'm not convinced that any
U2 issues, including BigEdit, originate with vDos per se; it's more
the way in which vDos interacts with Windows that has to be accounted
for in U2.

(Jordan has reported problems with XyWrite's FIND command, and
XyWrite's TREE command also doesn't work under vDosXy. These are
indeed vDos compatibility problems, though I personally don't view
them as earth-shaking.)

I take your point about big files. Although Windows itself handles
huge files (e.g. PAGEFILE.SYS), my experience is that Windows
*applications* that claim to have no file-size limit often handle big
files very slowly, if at all. U2's BigEdit handles this problem by
chopping big files into 500KB chunks, each of which performs snappily
in Xy4. When it's time to save edits, BigEdit handily stitches the
chunks back into the original big file. (My BigEd works similarly. It
uses John Walker's splits.exe https://www.fourmilab.ch/splits/ to
break the original file into chunks.) The ability to browse/edit huge
files is one of Xy4-'s advantages over many other editors.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx