[Date Prev][Date Next][Subject Prev][Subject Next][ Date Index][ Subject Index]

Re: XyWrite and TeX

Leslie wrote.
Interesting. I wouldn't know. I hate laptops.
After years of frustration, I decided that a "desktop replacement" laptop
is the way to go. Otherwise if you travel more than a couple of times per
year, and you need to do serious computer work away from home, you have to
go through hell.

After a lot of sweat and brow-scratching, I have most of my problems
solved. But the cursor is too slow (even in full screen). Characters lag
just a bit behind my typing, too.


Do you have your default ks=0,0?

Yep.
XP with XyDOS on a laptop (and I have the latest 3.2 Gig HP) is, well,
just satisfactory.


For me it zooms.

Maybe because you're not on a laptop.
I've downloaded a trial of VPC to see if the answer is to run Xy inside a
Win9x emulation. I'm also curious about Nota Bene, which at least I was
finally able to install under XP (which I couldn't under Win98, but that
was something weird about my particular setup).

Sounds to me like piling emulations on top of emulations. That trick never
works.

Probably not, but the Windows emulation on the Mac is so wonderfully
accurate (though slow), I thought I'd give it a try.

What I can understand is why the average user puts up with all the bad
new software. My wife suggests that most people not only restrict
themselves to Word, Outlook, and I.E. (never doing anything unusual), but
they do not customize anything and they just take things as they come, as
if they were facts of nature. If, in XP, it takes 8 steps through menus
just to search for a file, and if a little doggie comes on the screen,
well, that's just the way it is, they feel.


Aw! I like the little doggie.
This is wholly alien to me. I know it's an old canard, but going back to
the mid-80s, why and how did IBM put over the change from the XT keyboard
to the AT (the removal of the function keys on the left and the putting
of ctrl and alt in absurd positions).

Because that's the way it was on the old selectric keyboards, and on all
typewriters back unto the early twentieth century. Caps lock, shift.


But they had it RIGHT. For several years. Then they killed it.
I miss the Royal Standard keyboard from the mid-1950s, which had an
elongated tab key about where the return key would turn up on electric
models. You could hit it with your palm. I miss it but I don't expect to
see it again. And for sure I don't spend any time whining about it.


Whining has its pleasures.


Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx