Three cheers for XyWin

["Dr J.L. Gordon" jgordon@xxxxxxxx]

I write to join David Firestone in defence of XyWin. Despite my
comments last year about giving up on XyWin as a GUI wp (I
unfavourably compared it to Describe for OS/2), I believe the
thumping XyWin has recently been dished out here is not entirely
deserved. I know it has bugs, and I know it will not suit some
uses, or some users, but for me, it works quite well as a
Win-OS2 word processor.

I have recently gone back to using it for lecture writing. Why?
I like GUI word processors (yes, I finally made the adjustment).
The screens are just more readable (the appearance can so easily
be customised), and I like seeing the text as it will print.
Also, I still find Xy's code-based editing easier than the
styles of Describe, perhaps just because I know it better. With
a large collection of old lectures, tutorial handouts, reading
lists and overhead projections, all in some form of Xy format,
the task of doing a total conversion to Describe was just too
large. I tried. I gave up. I've continued to use Xy4DOS while I
learned Describe, but Xy4 was not adequate for the combination
of lectures and overheads. Because I wanted TrueType fonts and a
GUI screen, I cranked up XyWin again, did a bit of fine tuning,
and now I'm happily using all that Xy speed and keyboard
convenience to write new material while working with a pleasant
typeface zoomed to 130% on a 15in monitor. One of Xy's strengths
is the easy switch between windows. Any modern word processor
can switch between open windows, but I don't know of another
that makes it so easy from the keyboard. I wrote macros to
enable Describe to match most of the keyboard commands in Xy
that I use frequently (such as move by sentence; transpose
characters, words, sentences, paragraphs; change case, etc.),
but I couldn't figure out how to implement Xy's ctl-shft-n for
changing windows. This is one of Xy's great features and one of
the reasons I stick with it. Also, some of the material I am
writing requires e-mailing to colleagues. The ascii basis of Xy
text makes life so much easier. With Describe I needed to save
to ascii first then import to PMMail. Xy text shoots straight
in. Never a problem

I continue to use Describe every day and appreciate its
strengths. It remains ahead of XyWin on many counts (the
unlimited undo is great and it protects a writer's work like no
other wp I know), but for sheer editing ability, XyWrite (DOS
or Win) remains my preference. RE Bob Brody's comment that there
are plenty of editors about. True, but why change? What do you
gain? XyWrite in each of its versions has more writer's tools
built-in than any other wp I've tried.

Cheers,
John Gordon



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Dr J.L. Gordon
Department of Anthropology
University of Western Australia
Nedlands, WA 6907
AUSTRALIA

tel: +61 9 380 2850
fax: +61 9 380 1062

jgordon@xxxxxxxx
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