Xy4-Dosemu startup and quit tweaks

[Paul Lagasse pglagasse@xxxxxxxx]

The following are some tweaks I'm using to improve starting and quitting
XyWrite in Dosemu in Ubuntu; I'm passing them along in case they might
be of use to anyone. I'd also be interested to know if anyone else has
encountered these issues and how they've handled them.
I launch XyWrite using the keyboard shortcut Super+x (WinKey = Super,
AKA Mod4), but since I began using keystop, Dosemu would often hang on
keystop when using the keyboard shortcut; it never happened when
clicking on a launcher icon. The issue appears to be one of keyboard
sensitivity, and though that can be tweaked via Linux keyboard settings,
the result was unsatisfactory and did not always solve the problem.
The solution appears to be to pause before running keystop, which I do
via the Linux sleep command. I have added it to xy.bat, which I use to
start Xy4 (dosemu xy), before running keystop:

unix sleep 1s
c:\keystop\ks
c:\keystop\ksconfig bw
editor
exitemu
This pauses xy.bat for one second; a one second delay appears sufficient
to correct the problem. An extra "x" sometimes shows up in the program
window:

C:\>unix sleep 1s
x

before keystop runs.
Quitting Xy4-Dosemu also has had issues, except when doing so via the
command line (BC,quit,XC). Alt+F4 works fine, but if I had two XyWrite
windows open, one directly "on top" of the other on the desktop, Alt+F4
would close both (but not a third Xy4-Dosemu window). Also, closing
another program with Alt+F4, when that program's window was immediately
above Xy4's, would also close Xy4. (And, if an open file had not been
saved or a program was running, XyWrite would close anyway.) This is
part of a larger issue; occasionally other keys and key-combinations
(Alt+Tab) intended for the system or another program get captured by
Xy4, but the effects are less serious.
Assigning the "Close Window" Linux keyboard shortcut to Super+F4
(instead of Alt+F4) prevented the closing of a Linux program window from
also closing an Xy4 window, but did not stop two Xy4 windows from
closing unless an open file had not been saved. Altering my Alt+F4 key
to run quit on the command line also did not help. What has worked has
been adding a Pause (BX,p,Q2) to Alt+F4 before eXeCuting quit:

62=Q4XHBCq,u,i,t,BXp,Q2XC
Both changes, to Xy4's keyboard file and to Linux's keyboard shortcuts,
must be in place for this to work. If I make the changes to Xy4's *.kbd
but not to Linux's shortcuts, Alt+F4 will not close an Xy4-Dosemu window
that is directly under another Linux program; but when two Xy4 windows
are stacked and I close the first with Alt+F4, both will close. That
result surprised me.
One other item. Some programs that I had been running in a terminal run
much faster when you skip the terminal and launch them directly (or via
a script file) either from XyWrite's command line using Dosemu's
"system" command or via the "Run Application" dialog box (its name in
Gnome; usually assigned to Alt+F2 in the desktop managers I've used).
When I ran SP's nsgmls parser in Windows, where I was running the DOS
version, it took about 25 mins to process some 80 MB in 220 files; in
gnome-terminal it took about 4 1/2 mins; when I use the XyWrite command
line to run in the background a script file that launches the parser
("do/nv system parsefiles.sh&") the program takes about 15 secs to finish.

Paul Lagasse