Miscellaneous Queries

[nsivin@xxxxxxxx (Nathan Sivin)]

Carl di Stefano's comparative remarks on XYDOS 3 and 4 and XYWIN
raises a couple of interesting questions.

1. Is there really no way in XW to choose a display font for
WYSIWYG?

2. I realized from Carl's remarks that I could stop loading the
XD help file, which I never use, by commenting it out of
STARTUP.INT. Doing that does save a good bit of loading time.

3. Since my path from XY I to 4 was via Nota Bene, there are a
couple of simple things that it is frustrating not to have.
STACK.RUN, the splendid command stack XPL program for NB, made
it simple to find any previous command by typing the first
letter or so; why can't the one built into XD4 do that?

4. I agree with several people about how unattractive mousing
around is, but I find a trackball superior for things that
involve non-rectilinear movement from one point on the screen to
another, including dragging to select a block. The only problem
is that if, after selecting text, you want to go to a new
location to move it, setting the cursor down in the new place
cancels the block. My question is whether anyone knows of a
macro that will toggle a block off and on, which would overcome
this problem.

-- Nathan Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-3325