Myron,
I got into this discussion to see if there is a modern need that would make it
worthwhile to pull XyWrite into 2018. So far, there’s been a big mix of
opinions.
Personally, I’m nostalgic about XyWrite. I used to support if for my publishing
clients. I’m also nostalgic about my job as a programmer at Atex where the
editor was born.
Sent from Mail for Windows 10
________________________________
From: xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of
Myron Gochnauer <goch@xxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2018 8:07:22 PM
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: A radical idea: a new XyWrite
Sorry, but I have no idea why you would want to use XyWrite to support LaTeX.
If you think of LaTeX as a kind of text formatting 'language', XyWrite just
happens to be an especially good way of writing and editing things in that
language. Combining XyWrite and LaTeX can produce beautifully formatted books
much more easily than trying to do everything with Word or any other 'word
processor'.
XyWrite was designed for fast, efficient writing and editing. LaTeX was
designed to produce beautifully formatted books and other output, no matter how
technical the subject matter. Word was not designed for either of these things,
but probably for office work. Not surprisingly, there are more office workers
than there are scientists, literary editors or print journalists, so Word has
become the 'standard'.
It is not something I do at present, but years ago I used XyWrite (DOS) as my
primary editor for LaTeX documents for the simple reason that XyWrite's
keyboard, menus and defaults could easily be modified to make it very simple to
use LaTeX formatting codes. With relatively simple changes I could use familiar
keystrokes for footnotes, emphases, section styles, hidden comments, and, of
course, all of the XyWrite ways of doing search-and-replace, on the fly
'save/gets' or text macros, etc. When I was using a DOS version of the LaTeX
system, I think that from within Xy I could invoke the DOS LaTeX formatting
program and pass the Xy-prepared file to it. I know there were other XyWriters
who did much more sophisticated things to integrate, or at least connect,
XyWrite (champion editor) with LaTeX (champion format-and-print system). Any
ASCII editor can create a file with LaTeX formatting codes in it. XyWrite was
faster and more easily customizable than most, if not all, other ASCII editors.
XyWrite's raw speed advantage is probably no longer important, and may not have
endured the evolution of hardware and programming languages. Most word
processors and editors are certainly fast enough these days unless you have
truly extraordinary needs. But I don't know of any word processor or even
programming editor that can be configured, tweaked and customized so easily and
extensively as XyWrite. Programming editors seem most likely to be competitive
when it comes to customizability, and not surprisingly, many of these have
rather ancient origins in computer history. Anyway, why not use XyWrite
whenever you need an ASCII editor? Unless you must have constant feedback to
make sure you haven't messed up the formatting (the best reason for WYSIWYG
systems), why not tweak XyWrite into a lean, mean, editing machine for LaTeX,
MarkDown, LilyTeX or some other markup language?
Gee. After all these years, I still get excited about XyWrite. :-)
Myron
