Xy4 Menus

[Carl Distefano 70154.3452@xxxxxxxx]

Robert, I too admire the fact that the .MNU and .DLG files in Xy4
and XyWin are freely modifiable -- that's very much in the
XyWrite tradition. And I readily agree that Xy4's memory
management is so efficient that loading those files hardly
affects system performance, at least if Xy has been allotted a
full 4-Meg of expanded mem. Still, I prefer not to load DLG|MNU
unless a specific need arises, and it's comforting to know that
the vast majority of Xy's functions -- at least the ones I have
occasion to use -- still reside in EDITOR itself and continue to
be available via the command line.

Let's face it, menus and dialog boxes are a fact of life, and
will be for a long time to come. For better or worse, major apps
have become so complicated, it's nigh impossible to keep all the
commands in mind, even if there were a need to do so. When the
software is only occasionally used -- and every app has its share
of occasional users -- menus become indispensable. (I'd RTFM if
I could find TFM; it's usually in the office when I'm at home, or
vice versa.) The great part about Xy is that the command-line
alternative remains available, with or without menus; what a pity
if that option were to atrophy or die.

Tim questions why bother with a minimal Xy4 installation when
"XY3 is smaller and faster." Two big reasons, as I see it, Tim.
One, the enhanced command set and order-of-magnitude better
memory management of 4 are hard to give up, once you've gotten
used to them. Two, my "minimal" setup includes a 450K U2 file,
which is chock full of stuff that I couldn't do, or couldn't do
as well, in 3, stuff I still want when I'm working with a
pared-down setup.

Annie points out some III+ amenities that I miss in 4. Like those Type-2
Ascii-locator frames -- though XPL kludges are, of course,
possible. And I never have understood why TTG (or was it IBM?)
crippled func SD by hard- wiring it to a menu frame. (SK still
works as a standalone, but SD doesn't.) The "Application error"
you're getting, Annie, means that
"Tmacrdef", or whatever the required frame is called, is missing
from the .MNU file. The workaround, if you elect not to load
.MNU+.DLG, is to snitch the frame from wherever it lives and copy
it to, say, a .U2 file; then assign JM,[,2,.,T,m,a,c,r,d,e,f,] to a key. Me, I still use a
Signature throwback felicitously labeled {{C/g}} [now that's *gotta* be
IBM], as modified by Robert, which lists the first 77 bytes of all @ and &
S/Gs, by means of the VA@ operator. A variant that's totally
independent of the Help system is simply to create a file that lists the relevant
VA@'s, and then REad that file (in No Markers view) whenever you want the
S/G directory, thus:

Save/Gets (a/k/a Text Macros)
@A-@Z|@0-@9 in {VA$SG} plus &A-&Z|&0-&9
====================================================
@A: {VA@*65} (or {VA@A})
...
@Z: {VA@*90}
@0: {VA@*48}
...
@9: {VA@*57}
&A: {VA@*265}
...
&Z: {VA@*290}
&0: {VA@*248}
...
&9: {VA@*257}

The advantage of this low-tech approach is that it works in both DOS and
Win. For reasons that remain murky, TTG chose to disable Type C
frames -- the kind that display "scrollable" Help text -- in XyWin.

--------------
Carl Distefano
70154.3452@xxxxxxxx