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RE: #3 in Guardian Tech today, bare metal editors over Microsoft Word



I’m a technosaur and still found XYIII+ pretty easy. I started on a Kaypro with PerfectWriter, then began using Atex in  an ofc setting. Adopted XY because of similarity to Atex. Was greatly helped by two things: 1, an after-market book (it answered direct questions directly and clearly) and 2, I surely didn’t’ use more than 2% of its capabilities, as I used it essentially as a glorified typewriter, never doing anything fancy. I loved it.  Mornings on the way to the toilet I’d turn on the machine and by the time I’d pee’d  it was ready to go.

 

Eventually took on Word, reluctantly, when e-mail came in, but came to appreciate Word’s innumerable accent marks (critical in my wine writing) and auto-correct, which because of my steadily and alarmingly degrading manual skills has become critical.

early on I recommended  it to more sophisticated writers—and none even complained about its being hard to learn or use.  People who recommended WordStar never got off so easily, did they?

 

From: xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Myron Gochnauer
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2018 10:46 AM
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: #3 in Guardian Tech today, bare metal editors over Microsoft Word

 

Quote:
       XyWrite had muscles, to be sure, but you had to know where to
     look for them. Perhaps the most unfriendly piece of software
     ever written, XyWrite demanded that its users learn thousands of
     commands and execute them perfectly.

 

Interesting.  I started using XyWrite with version 2+, and don’t recall it being particularly unfriendly. But, of course, I actually read the printed documentation from start to finish. The reveal-codes view made it easy to find and correct formatting problems, something that became increasing difficult with many other programs.