Re: Menus (not) in Xy4

[OkAnnie@xxxxxxxx]

"I can't think of a good reason to do XPL programming just to
avoid dialog boxes." --Tim Baehr

Hi, Tim. I read your defense of dialog boxes and menus with
interest, but remain unconvinced. I find them viscerally
counterproductive. Other people can't think with music playing. I
can't think with visual distractions on my screen (here the music
never stops, but doesn't emanate from my CPU). For graphical
tasks, dialog boxes and menus are appropriate and useful. For
graphical tasks, I don't (ordinarily) program lines or paint
between x/y coordinates. I use graphical apps. But when using a
text processor my thinking is linear. Dialog boxes and menus
interrupt, disrupt, confuse, and constrict my thought process.

It's not just xyWrite. I can't program either with an IDE. CMline
compiling is supposedly more difficult. A few days into C, I
zipped a much-praised dos
IDE and started compiling with do commands from the xyW 3 CMline.
I couldn't think with that jumble of menus and dialog boxes in
front of me and without a totally, easily remappable .kbd. To me
the command line implies openness, all available possibilities;
dialog boxes and menus represent options restricted by an
extraneous layer between the app and me. And indeed CMline
compiling offers more options than IDE. There are things that can
be done only with
CMline switches. To find xyW heading the other way is dismaying.
The more xyWrite is like other word processors--kernel and
interface--the less xyWrite has a raison d'etre. Vive la
difference!

"Annie, you can get a view of your Save/Gets. Assign the function SD" ...

Sorry I didn't make myself clear. I'm familiar with the various
ways to enter functions and the kind of v4 @dir you described. I
could raise a dir with SD before I disabled menu and dialog box
options. Now SD produces an
"application error" msg. Unsurprisingly, so does JM (TMACRDEF).
It's why I offered SD as an example of one way xyW4, to be fully
functional, requires menus/dialog boxes. According to the docs,
other options that I wouldn't use like document information are
shut off too. (I didn't mention SK because it worked normally
before the changes and does now.) Carl offers an interesting
workaround that I'm going to try before re-enabling .DLG and
.MNU, which I
*will* do, but not cheerfully. ...

Your inside-XyQuest observations on the genesis of the current
interface saddened me all over again. The only analogy I can
think for IBM's role vis-a-vis XyQuest is too raw for this
rarified venue. 80x86 users are the poorer for want of the
software that XyQuest would have published if its demo graphical
xyWrite hadn't attracted IBM's fickle eye.   --A

========================== annie fisher  nyc