Xy III-4-Win

["Carl L. Distefano" 70154.3452@xxxxxxxx]

To Annie Fisher:

      >v3 is--for my purposes--the closest-to-perfect DOS product I
      >know: a universal front end. It belongs in some unnamed
      >category of its own. TUI? I consider it a programmable DOS
      >shell/text editor that also has word processing features.
      >The Windows icon I use is the Swiss army knife. v3 XPL is so
      >powerful and flexible ...

Ah! A kindred spirit! Those were (still are) my feelings exactly about
XyIII: the combination of small size -- minuscule by today's
bloated standards! -- blazing speed and endless malleability puts
it in a class by itself. If there's one DOS program that should
go into the time capsule, this is it (I'd vote for v3.55 --
parsing with wildcards extends configurability by an order of
magnitude; see, e.g., R.J.Holmgren's
CTRLCHAR.TXT, a XyIII classic and must-read for v3 XPLniks and
customizers). Thus I was disappointed with Signature -- not
because of the increased size or variances from III+ features (I
could live with that), but mainly because of the degradation in
speed (that I could NOT live with, and so never did any "real"
work with Sig).

Xy4 was a different story. You say, "XyWrite 4 was really
Signature 2". Well, yes and no. The features are quite similar,
BUT the old XyWrite speed (or an acceptable approximation) is
back! And, by dumping the big
.HLP, .MNU and .DLG files, you can (with a little work) make it
look and feel like III+. And, I discovered, by dumping just
about everything else save EDITOR.EXE and few others, you can fit
it (unZIPped) on a single 3.5" floppy! I've even *run* Xy4
*from* a floppy (on an 8086 10Mz laptop sans hard drive, no
less), with respectable results. When that sinks in, then the
many real enhancements in Xy4 (and, yes, Signature, which, BTW, I
understand Herb Tyson grew to appreciate) -- much-improved memory
management (in my setup XyIII+ crashed maybe 3-4 times a week,
especially with big files; not anymore), extensions to the III+
command set (the /NV switch alone is worth the admission price,
but there are many, many more, e.g., the DIR command), and the
extensions to XPL (MANY more system
VAriables, really useful new funcs like DZ, DM, ZT..., string
literal concatenation, etc. etc.) -- really begin to shine.

"With XyWin, at least I understand what I'd be getting." (I have
XyWin but mostly don't use it: the draft- and eXPanded-view
font's unreadable and the loss of control over screen colors is
too much for my aching eyes to bear. But....) What you'd be
getting, of course, is a port of Xy4 to Windoze. OK if you like
to mouse around (I'd rather not take my hands off the keyboard,
thank you) or use fonts (access to True Type *is* a big plus, and
XyWin's WYSIWYG display, unlike Xy4's, is truly editable and
quite zippy). If you do head that way, bear in mind that you can make
XyWin look and feel a lot like Xy4, which is to say, a lot like
XyIII! In fact, I use the same .KBD and .U2 files for both DOS
and Win, which is very convenient 'cause when I tinker in one,
I'm automatically tinkering in the other.

A tinkerer is basically what I am. *Not* a guru -- heavens! Robert
Holmgren is the guru, or one of them. And the nameless code wizards at
XyQuest/TTG who spawned this wonderful thing we call XyWrite
(what you call corn). We heap so much abuse on them (much of it
deserved not by them, but by their higher-ups), but we oughtn't
forget it's they who make all this tinkering possible.

Anyway, I've gone on too long. To work....