XyWrite to Word

["Thomas J Hawley" tjh@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Harry Binswanger  on Fri, 24 Mar 2006
23:57:05 -0500

> These are precisely the command line commands that are NOT needed. Word
> already has keyboard shortcuts for at least most of these things:

Control N does indeed give you a new document in Word. But it's an unnamed
file, so you then have to save it, which involves more keystrokes and dialogs.
And the new file is based on the default template normal.dot, which--unless
you're doing something quick and dirty--is not what you want.

In XyWrite, you can (1) open and (2) name a file, which is (3) based on a
template, on a single command line:

NE newfile,template 

Those are three separate operations in Word, even if you're using keyboard
shortcuts.

That's the kind of XyWrite efficiency that could be transferred to Word (and
would already be there if Microsoft had any clues about how to design a good
word processor interface, which clearly they do not).

Personally, I've always found XyWrite's two-letter command abbreviations (NE
for example) to be much easier to remember than the various control-alt-shift +
key shortcuts.

Tom Hawley
New York
tjh@xxxxxxxx