OVERVIEW OF WRITE STUFF FEATURES by Dick Estel There are two or three ways to do many of the special functions in The Write Stuff. All are right and none are wrong--but some are easy, which the author of the program says is for experienced or expert users. What a deal--doing it the easy way will make you an expert! Sit down at the computer, load TWS, load a file that is several paragraphs long, and practice as you read this article. You can experiment with the program without any damage if you follow two rules: 1. Use a copy of the program, not the original. 2. Use a newly formatted disk to save your experiments. First, a basic fact about The Write Stuff: Without any exception that I know of, when the cursor is on the command line, and there is a list of menu choices displayed, you can press the first letter of any of the words shown to take action. For the most part, this applies when you enter command mode by pressing the [UP ARROW]. In TWS 64 you will see: [BACKARROW] Help Edit Print Save Load After pressing [UP ARROW] you can cursor to any of the choices. But it's easier to do it the "expert" way, by just pressing the first letter of the choice you want. Often, this will bring up another menu, and the same technique can be used with this new list of choices. For example, if you press p (for print), you will see the print set-up screen, with the following choices at the top: Print to: [BACK ARROW] Screen Printer If you press s, the file will immediately be printed to the screen (i.e., the print preview display). If you press p, it will be sent to your printer. Try the other choices to see how they work. Remember, if you are using the autosave mode, pressing s will immediately save your file, replacing any earlier version with the same name. And remember to follow the two rules mentioned at the top of this article. The switch from typing on paper to typing on a screen created the need for a new technique in typing. Instead of moving the paper around under a fixed spot, the typist now moves the cursor around the screen to the location where text entry is desired. This can be accomplished with the cursor keys, which usually move the cursor one space at a time in any direction, and which can be held down for repeated movement. This is fine for moving the cursor a word or two, but tedious when you need to move through several paragraphs, or to the 10th page of a 20 page document. There are two major categories of techniques for moving around your document in The Write Stuff. First are the cursor movement features, where using the F keys takes you beyond the one character movement allowed with cursor keys. The basics of this are simple: F1 moves forward a word at a time, placing the cursor on the first letter of the next word. F2 moves back a word. F3/F4 moves forward or backward one sentence--but remember that TWS defines sentences as a string of text which ends in a period. A decimal point is seen as the end of a sentence. The cursor is moved to the first text character following a period. [RETURN]'s and spaces are skipped. Shifted spaces, however, are defined as a character, and if a shifted space follows the period, that's where the cursor will go. F5/F6 move forward and back one paragraph. The cursor will go to the first position after a [RETURN], even if that character is a space or another [RETURN]. The details of where the cursor goes is not a big deal and usually doesn't make any difference. If you hit F3 and the cursor stops after a decimal point, just keep hitting F3 till you get where you want to be. F7 moves the cursor to the bottom of the screen, with some minor exceptions that again don't really matter. When you hit F7, the last word on the screen will become the first word on the screen, unless you are close to the end of the file. There are occasions when the cursor will go beyond the end of the screen, but I've never been able to figure out the rule. No matter--if you're trying to get to the bottom of the file, hit F7 till you get there! But wait--there's an even quicker way to get to the bottom of your file: Press and hold [SHIFT], then press [CLR] [CLR]. The first [CLR] takes you to the bottom of the screen, the next one to the end of the file. You can probably guess what [HOME] [HOME] will accomplish. F8 moves up approximately 18 screen lines. Another way to move quickly through a document is to hunt for a specific word or letter sequence. Obviously hunting for the word "the" is going to produce a lot of hits. Here's a technique I use: If I'm working on a document and want to be able to find a specific spot later, I enter three or four asterisks (****). Then I can quickly find that spot by using the Hunt feature. Finally, let's look at moving or copying sections of text. This is accomplished by entering command mode and selecting Edit. This puts the program into the copy text mode, described in the manual and on screen as "eating text." Remember, when the cursor is on the command line, and there is a list of menu choices displayed, you can press the first letter of any of the words shown to take action. You can get into the "eat text" mode in two ways: 1. Press [UP ARROW]. You will then have the following choices: [BACK ARROW] Help Edit Print Save Load You can cursor to Edit, but it's easier (and more "expert") to just press e. You will now see another menu: [BACK ARROW] Eat Text Restore Text Clear Text Guess what--you can cursor to Eat Text, or press e (you already knew that, didn't you?) You can also get to this point just by pressing [CONTROL] e. Regardless of which method you use, you will see the following: [BACK ARROW] Word Sentence Paragraph Again, instead of moving the cursor to the desired choice, you can just press the first letter of the word. Thus [CONTROL] e p will "eat" the paragraph the cursor is on. You can continue to press p to eat more paragraphs. The same concept applies for words and sentences. Remember, the program identifies any period as indicating the end of as sentence, so if you have periods used as decimal points, text will be eaten up to and including the decimal point. You can eat a combination of words, sentences and paragraphs. And pressing c will "eat" an individual character, although this choice is not shown in the menu. Here's another way to eat text, and a related warning. Earlier in this article we talked about moving around the screen with the F keys (F1 to move word by word, F3 for sentences, F5 for paragraphs). When you are in the Eat Text mode, these keys will EAT word/sentence/paragraph. This can get you into trouble if you think you are in normal edit mode but you are actually in Eat Text mode. When text is copied (eaten), it is saved in a buffer, which is simply a section of computer memory set up for this purpose by the program. As long as the text remains in the buffer, it can be copied anywhere, as many times as desired. After you have finished "eating" the desired words/sentences/paragraphs, press the [BACK ARROW] to return to normal text mode. You can now restore the text where you want it, and of course, there are two ways to do it: 1. Press [UP ARROW], select Edit, then select Restore Text (remember, you can just press [UP ARROW] e r. You can also press [CONTROL] r. As soon as you hit r, the text will be copied at the cursor position. If you want the text in another area, move the cursor, and press [CONTROL] r again. Remember, text in the buffer is lost as soon as you enter Eat Text mode again. Press [CONTROL] e, and you will see the message Stomach Emptied at the bottom of the screen. Practice and experiment. Did we mention that you should always use a backup copy of the program?