Re: Looking for XyWrite

[Carl Distefano CLDistefano@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from Russell Lewis  Wed, 25
Nov 1998 09:56:29 -0500 (EST)

-> I love the command line interface as well as the speed of the
-> program. Some of the keystroke combinations will take a bit of
-> getting used to. In particular I am used to Wordstar commands,
-> so when I type Control plus left or right arrow, I am used to
-> moving one word to the left or right.

Russell:

XyWrite can emulate Wordstar commands and just about any other
keyboard configuration you can think of -- no problem. Once you get
comfortable with the bread-and-butter commands, turn your attention
to *functions*. They're the atoms of operability at the heart of
this program. Xy4 has 380 of them. Examine a sample keyboard file
to see how text and functions are combined and mapped to keys.
You'll get the hang of it in no time, and then you'll be on your
way. As to some of your questions:

-> will Xy3 handle regular expressions?

No, it won't. Neither will Xy4. The concept is foreign to XyWrite,
which, as you've been finding out, has its own peculiar set of
search and replace wildcards. One of Xy's great strengths, however,
is its ability to launch and take output from external DOS programs.
(It's done with the DO command or, what I find more reliable, the
DOS /C command.) So if you want to do grep searches with regular
expressions, just DO a DOS grep program from the XyWrite command
line.

-> I am particularly interested how I can enter the angle-bracket
-> delimiters that control the formatting.

If you issue so-called "embedded" commands from the command line
(known colloquially around here as the "CMline"), the angle brackets
are entered automatically. The default keystrokes for entering
those characters manually are, I think, Alt-LessThan & Alt-
GreaterThan. Maybe it's Ctrl. If you're talking about searching
for those characters, in Xy3 you first have to toggle into eXPanded
view (Ctrl-F9).

-> how do I do command-line recall in Xy3?

Visit XyWWWeb (URL below) and search for "Final version (2.0d) of
Stack for XyWrite III+". Download the file, called STACK20D.ZIP, and
follow the instructions in the doc.

Good luck!


--------------
Carl Distefano
CLDistefano@xxxxxxxx
http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/