XyWin

[Robert Holmgren]

 Dear SysOp: For what it's worth, this isn't sensible in XyWin:

 On my system, ®VN*BO¯=15
 and ®MDBO¯=Bold®MDNM¯ text (visual)
 but ®MD15¯<>Bold®MDNM¯ text (visual), it creates something completely
different and apparently uncontrollable (italicized text, with horizontal lines
through it). Note that there are no "MD BO=15"-type statements in my
XWSET.DFL.

 Does this mean that numeric MoDes are no longer useable, or that you can no
longer control how a particular MoDe-type will display? I mean, its one thing
to remove important functionality (like Type-C frames and Type-5 text frames)
simply because XyQuest's help system no longer requires them (whether we users
still like or need C-frames is apparently of no concern), but its equally
nonsensical to retain intact the old controls over IBM color text modes when
they no longer have any bearing on the monochrome graphics that XyWin uses!

 You know, XyWin isn't half bad, actually. The display is terrific. Can't
complain about the speed in Graphic view either; its close enough to Xy4
eXPanded mode to be mighty impressive, considering what you have to do to paint
the screen (66% as fast as Xy4 XP). If you'd just clean up the keyboard mess
and liberate us from the M$Win CUA straitjacket (dedicated keys), and fix a few
of the most egregious bugs, it would really be quite OK; we could screw up our
courage and start to do real work with it! The bug where big (UN-DeFined!)
sections of text get duplicated and triplicated in my current document is the
one that slays me...

 Most important by far, XyWin desperately needs an option to override the
keyboard rigidity. Fact is, XyWin surrenders to M$ both of the Alt keys, both
Shift keys (we can't separate 'em), M$ seems to have a thumb on both Ctrl keys
too (which don't work right or reliably, haven't bothered to investigate why
yet) -- leaving us with exactly *what* in the way of shifting keys for our own
TABLEs? Ctrl-5 on the keypad? It's ridiculous.

 Plus, speed up Expanded and Draft views. (Ought to be a lot easier to display
that Graphics -- so why are XP|WG 9x-12x slower?) And replace the
Draft|Expanded screen font -- yuck! Or offer some choice in this area. The
one we're stuck with is unutterably bad. But... you know ... I can see you
guys did a ton of work on XyWin, and it's a good product.