: I think you are underrating XYDOS for graphical tasks. Nathan: You are undoubtedly right. I used v4 only briefly because of the sloppily documented function redefinitions and because xyDOS's graphical mode is non-essential to me: I've used my PostScript interpreter's screen driver for a preview since shortly after Xyquest, instead of releasing the graphical xyWrite 4 it demo'd publicly in early '89 or '90, took that fateful stroll down the garden path with IBM. And I feel as you do about wanting to write and edit on a nongraphical screen. Reading xylist postings makes me realize, however, that my take on xyWrite is skewed. I just don't think of xyWrite as a word processor, and never have. The first few years, I used it exclusively to format raw text with complex layouts to be printed on another system, much as you did with GML. I learned XPL (pre-Tyson) writing a system that translated xyW codes and added extensive MCS/PV coding. The only graphical preview was on MCS unix machines four floors away and my "printer" was an imagesetter at the same location; error tolerance was zero. To me, xyWrite is a programmable command-line DOS shell/text editor, a nearly universal front end for my niche dirty-little-secret graphical word processor, for QuarkXPress, for my PostScript interpreter, and my C compiler, and as an offline reader programmed to sort and display what I collect online. I laughed when I read a letter to PCWeek a few years ago from a space industry engineer mocking a writer who'd warned readers not to use a word processor as a programming editor. He was using xyWrite with C the same way I was. But I think it's more accurately a text editor with word processing features that may be used or ignored. I have a PS 600dpi laser printer and a tabloid-width inkjet now for proofing, but I've programmed for months at a time with no printer at all and never missed it. I'm confident that v3 and XPL can handle whatever I throw at them next; it probably will be something else I couldn't have anticipated when my v3 was new in '87. The only way the chameleon shows its age is incomprehension that partitions can be bigger than 33mb(!). Once again, awed thanks to those anonymous Xyquest wizards, and hats off to Herb Tyson for demystifying the arcane. --Annie ====================== annie fisher | nyc | okAnnie@xxxxxxxx