Re: XyWrite for Windows

["Bob Brody" rabrody@xxxxxxxx]

Replying to a post by  Robert Holmgren:

Ahh, good to hear from you. Glad to see you still care about
this program.

> It's a Windows thing (although XyQuest didn't necessarily have
> to play by their rules). Windows wants the Alt key, lotsa
> grief in consequence. Ctrl and Shift you can split, left &
> right, without any problem. I remember trying to give Windows
> the left Alt key with "ALT=56" while stealing RightALT for my
> own purposes, but can't recall whether it works. Try naming it
> differently, e.g. "RDUMMY=98".

I did try some different words, MALT=98, RALT, RSTUFF, etc., but
with no luck. I'll play around with it and see if something
works out. There's an undocumented procedure in Word for Windows
that results in being able to use Alt keys for your own
assignments; I'll dig that out and see if it hits on something
that can be extrapolated. (Brian Livingston, who writes the
Windows column for InfoWorld and has a few books out regarding
Windows, has written about this in general and how to circumvent
Windows' grab of the Alt key.)

> There are now multiple Help files; the ones with user
> programming are U2 (probably doesn't exist on your system
> unless you create it)...

Right.

> ... plus .DLG and .MNU. Don't screw around with .DLG and .MNU
> unless you really know what you're doing; they belong to
> XyQuest. Download REORGNZ2.ZIP and SMARTSnn.ZIP from
> ftp://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/pub/eaan -- they'll convey an idea of
> how to implement XyWin programming.

I'll check out those files, thanks. I wasn't planning on doing
too much by way of anything additional. Just want to convert
some of my interactive stuff from the Xy 3.55 help facility that
reads from fields input, and perhaps house a bunch of small XPL
routines under one roof. Glad to hear this flexibility is still
around.

>> P.S. Is it fair to assume that this is the end of the line for
>> XyWrite

> No. Xy5 is announced. They're gonna call it Smart Words or
> some dumb thing like that. Another Windows app. End of the
> line for a text-mode WP? Probably.

Of course, there's always GNU Emacs (a religion by some accounts
but simply an excellent editor by my account) for roll your own
with its Lisp programming language integration, calls to SED,
AWK, Perl, etc. A text-processing junkie's delight. I haven't
looked into the Windows port of GNU Emacs (a 10 megabyte download
for starters) and have only used it on Unix systems.

> The owner (Ken Frank)
> asked the other day what enhancements people might like to see
> in a bug-fix of III+ --

A port to Linux. 

Alas, fond that I am/was of III+, I've been driven (not
willingly) to GPF, err Windows, for a variety of software
reasons. I don't think I'll be doing much looking back, however,
other than perhaps to massage a legacy file format from a
spreadsheet or some-such.

I suppose any number of reasons exist if I really thought about
it but for me the premiere attraction to XyWrite has been the
ASCII file format. If not for the ASCII file format I'd have
probably given up on XyWrite by now. There are very good DOS
ports of SED, AWK, Perl, etc, available and with those tools, and
some wherewithal for using them, text processing has few limits.
It's ironic that few (any?) programs support XyWrite's files
while the most powerful text processing utilities support ASCII
files, not proprietary binary formats. The DOS world is
hopelessly twisted. You can spot a DOS user miles away by
reading their Web page's HTML. Mired in proprietary browser
extensions as opposed to understanding anything about cross-
platform portability (the reason for the Web's being).

Anyway, having to work in the GPF, err Windows, world for now, I
prefer the integration (what there is of it) of Windows software.

>> or is the suggestion box still open for future versions
>> and enhancements?

> TTG will probably say that they're eager to hear from you.
> 99.99% of the time they ignore us, though.

It would be nice if XyWrite supported regex (regular
expressions). Wildcards are better than nothing but why not go
full throttle with support for regular expressions.


Best,

Bob

p.s. Guy opens his front door, sees a snail inching towards him
on the porch, picks it up and throws it as far as he can into the
woods. A year and a half later there's a tiny knock at the front
door. Guy opens the door and there's the same snail, which asks:
"Now what was THAT all about?"