Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ucbvax!DALAC.BITNET!BRIGHT From: BRIGHT@DALAC.BITNET (BOB BRIGHT) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Subject: Re: WordPerfects??? Message-ID: <8801250003.AA27676@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 24 Jan 88 23:27:00 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 61 Rich Dankert (lakesys!rich@csd1.milw.wisc.edu) writes: > Just have a question here. Why the mousetrap program? [Word Perfect] >does allow the lockout of the menu bar, which may be the reason for the >not so clean break upon exit. Nite I can understand, to blank the screen >but another screen saver utl may solve the other problem your experiencing. I keep moustrap resident because I like the menu bar locked all the time, and not just when I'm in Word Perfect. (Once you get used to moustrap, it's impossible to do anything without it. Menus start dropping all over the place; and *imagine* having to manually move the mouse up to the menu bar! Uugh.) Anyway, your first thought was mine too. Even when I boot WP cold with *no* accessories or utilities resident, it doesn't clean up after itself properly, and subsequent applications (e.g., Uniterm 2.0a 003; try it and see) lock up or misbehave if I don't reboot. Of course, nite and/or moustrap might be responsible in part for some of the other bugs I've run into. E.g., the WP manual states that you can record macros using either the menu bar commands or keyboard equivalents. I've found that the mouse commands work only sporadically or not at all when recording macros, and it's just possible that this behaviour is due to having moustrap resident (though I doubt it, since the macro presumably records just the commands, and not the actual mouse movements). No big deal: just make sure to use keyboard commands while recording macros. Given the ease with which one can work around this and similar bugs, a wholesale application of Mill's methods in a last-ditch attempt to confirm that WP gets along well enough with my resident utilities just doesn't seem worth the trouble. > Key click problem, well I can't say that I have encountered that >either, but then I don't have the volume up, as it slows my typing down ;~}. >Unless your talking about something different than I am interpreting. If I'm not mistaken, the key-click problem is really due to a TOS bug, which the authors of WP for the ST apparently weren't familiar with. If you've been running for a while, under certain conditions (not sure exactly what they are, though I seem to encounter the problem when I'm using the mouse a lot) your machine will start clicking away as if you were holding down a key. (Assuming that you have the volume turned up, of course. Just how fast do you type, anyway, Rich? :-)) As a side effect the Repeat dialogue often pops up in the middle of your screen, since the bug in question makes TOS think that you're trying to choke it with escape characters, and WP uses the escape key to call the Repeat sequence. Again, it's a trivial problem -- just hit and carry on with what you were doing. (I think Moshe Braner ran into a similar difficulty with early versions of more.ttp; perhaps he could comment?) For anyone considering buying WP, I'd like to emphasize once again that even *with* the bugs in the current version, it's eminently usable. I had the luxury of being able to borrow a copy of WP from the English Dept. here last fall. I gave it a fairly solid workout for a couple of months, so I had a pretty good idea of what bugs and limitations I could expect to encounter, before I purchased my own copy. (The educational price in Canada, BTW, is $160). If you need the power (I especially like the recursive macros, and the superb merge facility), WP is indeed worth every penny. BBB Bob Bright Philosophy Dept. Dalhousie University Halifax, NS B3H 3J5