Re: FILEMENU.PM [longish]

[Peregrine@xxxxxxxx]

Rene writes:

> I have three kids who are are learning to "use computers" at school, but it
> is silly little pictures and point and click.
> However, they see me use XYwrite, and they mightily impressed by how fast I
> can crank out a file.
> Maybe one day I can get them interested. The last generation?

Maybe Carl is right about the Xyaspora (I loved that, too, Carl), but I know
many of us can relate experiences like I had yesterday that point to XyWrite
being more functional than the rest.

I needed to convert a spreadsheet to tab-delimited text from Excel and clean
up extraneous characters, then e-mail it for import into Quark XPress for the
Macintosh.
Used XyWrite as the final step to be sure I'd cleaned it all up, toggled to
expanded mode to look for those dratted tildes, and used the CHange command
to wipe out exactly 542 extraneous quotation marks in less than a second. My
co-workers had cleaned up last year's version of that same spreadsheet by
deleting each of those characters by hand! They like me a lot today (even
though they could have accomplished this in Word, had they known).

My kids wonder about XyWrite and I tell them it helps me write better. At
ages 12, 10 and 7, they don't care to know more. But I wonder if the novelty
of GUI interfaces will wear off someday to the point that people start to
look more for function than form. If that happens, something like XyWrite may
prevail. We cannot long afford to expend unnecessary resources on anything,
IMHO. I'm hooked, meanwhile, and enjoy more than ever the way I can "tweak"
the interface with little amenities like Carl's FILEMENU.PM ....

Jeff Seager