Re: For Kenneth Frank: Long Filenames et al.

[nsivin@xxxxxxxx (Nathan Sivin)]

Robert Holmgren:

I apologize for interrupting while you upbraid Kenneth Frank, but
I am having some trouble understanding your complaints about the
XW keyboard's "rigid adherence to Windows conventions" and your
demand for interoperability between the XY and XW keyboards. As
my message a couple of weeks ago indicated, I am able to use my
highly customized
XY keyboard under XW with hardly a modification, so that there
was no learning curve at all. I was able to free a couple of
keys by removing your splendid Stacker, which is an enormous boon
in XY, because I find the command stack in XW, if a tad less
elegant, quite adequate without external aids.

I still mostly use XY, and am in fact grateful for several
respects in which it accepts "rigid Windows conventions," notably
the old ^Ins etc. conventions for cutting and pasting, and the
great ease in selecting blocks with a trackball by placing the
cursor at the beginning, holding down the shift key, and clicking
at the end.
Although I prefer keystrokes when they are more efficient (most
of the time), I have to admit that that mouse trick is one of the
great inventions of the PC realm. In addition to its merit, it
means I can use two DOS word processors and two Windows ones
without having to remember four commands for each function.

-- Nathan Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-3325