Re: shortcuts in fiction

[Wolfgang Bechstein bechstein@xxxxxxxx]

"Harriet Hodges"  wrote:

> What XyWrite
> seems particularly good at is allowing and encouraging 17 versions of the
> same drab tale.

I know that I'm straying from the core filament of this thread here, but
in my humble opinion, transparently managing different states of a file
in progress is precisely one of the very few things that XyWrite is
_not_ good at.

I mean, I hate Mickeysoft Whirred as much as the next guy/gal on this
list, but its undo/redo feature seems to me much more powerful than Xy's
native "undo" and even the considerably more sophisticated undo and
command line stack functionality brought to us courtesy of Carl
Distefano and Robert Holmgren. In Word, you can for example do an
extensive search and replace, followed by some formatting steps, some
editing, and then some more search and replace, and then you can step
backwards and forwards at will between the respective states of the file
with simple clicks of the Undo and Redo buttons. Especially the
capability to pretend that a search and replace never happened can be
highly convenient at times. In Xy, the only way to achieve this is by
intentionally saving differently named versions of the same file, or by
falling back on autosaved tmp files, but managing and keeping track of
these can be a major hassle. [Quite possibly, all of this is moot and
has already been taken care of by some as yet unexplored--by me--facet
of U2. If so, I'm willing to stand/sit/lie corrected.]

And of course, undo/redo in Word has the drawback that it only allows
moving through changes in the same (or reverse) order that they were
made, and once a file is closed, one loses the undo information. This
and a zillion of other features are the reason that I'd never forego my
lean-mean-text-oriented Xy in favor of any lumbering Behemoth from
Redmond, but I'd just like to point out that (as any Shrek-indoctrinated
kid knows) even ogres can have lovely features, and elves can
occasionally stumble.

Okay, back to the fiction writers...

Wolfgang Bechstein
bechstein@xxxxxxxx