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RE: text to cmd line

Everyone has to agree wholeheartedly w/ Carl that the CI command "has to
rank as one of the marvels of word-processing in any era."

That command, by itself is a wonder, but it got exponentially better when
vers. 4 came out, because the CHange and SEarch commands were expanded to
accept wildcards (? and *), which was one of the most significant
improvements, along with the /nv switch, which also came out at that time
(I think).

I may be wrong, but many of the Xy commands (dir, ch, se, etc.) accept the
wildcards.


This feature is exceedingly helpful to me, particularly in file management.

=====
I recall with great fondness the hours I used to sit on my front porch on
weekends in the mid and late 80s, going through the well-organized XY
loose-leaf binder manual, paging through it, command after command. At
first it was like reading a foreign language, but after a bit, it was one
of the most significant learning experiences of my life. Then I discovered
R. Holmgren and his bulletin board, and xpl. ... and now this email list.


Isn't life great? Only in America!

=======



At 08:42 PM 11/6/01 +0000, you wrote:


Are you talking about Xy3? Because I don't recall ever
seeing anything like this in Xy4 (or, for that matter, in
Xy3) unless the file was too big to fit comfortably in
memory in the first place.  What I'm suggesting is that
any anomalous behavior along these lines is a function of
memory-handling and memory limits, not of CI's design per
se. Even today, XyWrite's Change Invisible command has
to rank as one of the marvels of word-processing of any
era.

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

> It's kind of funny about the differences between the CI, CV, and CH
> commands. I used to use CI whenever I didn't need to choose yes or
no...if I

> was sure of the replace, I just wanted it done. But sometimes in very large
> documents only the first two-thirds of the changes got made. It seemed like
> CI would after a certain distance. So I switched to using CH, which
does the

> changes automatically but shows you as it goes along (people who don't know
> Xywrite are fascinated by this when they happen by...the screen is just a
> blur of activity). Judging by the fact that I never have the problem when I
> use CH, I'm guessing that CI can actually loose its place in a long
> operation (maybe modern machinces are too fast for it)...but because CH has
> to actually "go to each instance" (so to speak), it doesn't. I think.
> Whatever the reason, it works.
>
> Brian Henderson
> Print Composition Dept.
> Mitchell1
> San Diego, CA
>
> brian.henderson@xxxxxxxx
> (858) 391-5000 - x.6533
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Young For Life Products, Ltd [mailto:contact@xxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2001 10:20 AM
> To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: text to cmd line
>
>
> "Which gets me to a very wonderful program I wrote at that time, which
allow

> one to take the defined text and incorporate it into a search and replace
> routine. This program prompts you to choose whether the command should be
> CH (change), CV (change verify), or CI (change invisible). I think CI is
> nearly useless today with the high speed computers, but back then, when
> everyone was working on the old 088s then the ultra-superspeed ATs (288, I
> think) it was fun to watch the computer go through the changes in a long
> file. In those days we couldn't even comprehend how fast the 386s would
be."

>
> I'd like to add my two-bits to this: when you say that CI is now
obsolete, I

> must disagree, but not for the same reason you gave. I hate being prompted.
> I also don't enjoy watching the screen flicker as a routine churns. My
> attitude, when I put a command on the command line in Xywrite - and one of
> the reasons I love Xywrite, especially previous to XY4 - is "JUST DO IT - I
> WOULDN'T HAVE SAID IT IF I DIDN'T MEAN IT!!" The nice thing about CI vs. CV
> is it just does it, without second guessing me. If I really need CV, I'll
> specifically use it. I don't remember whether CH prompts or not, I don't
> think I've ever used it.
>
> Now I have to figure out how to change the defaults in my new XY4 so it
> stops the damned prompting it keeps doing when I tell it to AB.
>
> Charles