Noble software that met an ignoble fate, XyWrite no longer is under development by that name. But many journalists and some publishers, professionals, and academics will use the software till--in Paul Andrews's words--"they uncurl our cold, stiff fingers from our keyboard," so let us speak of xyWrite in the present tense.

A famously fast, robust, command-driven text processor/file manager that publishers from Johannesburg to Jakarta, from San Francisco to Kansas City to West 43rd Street, relied on throughout the '80s and some do even now, the software is an unrivaled writer's tool. Derived from the Atex typesetting system by the same developers, xyWrite 3 pioneered (well-established in various courtrooms) the auto-replace feature that while you type substitutes a word or phrase for a user-defined abbreviation. Other equally clever features assist text manipulation, and the superb Microlytics spellcheck and thesaurus are integrated. But xyWrite's cardinal virtue may be that it stays out of the writer's way.

If you believe xyWrite 3 couldn't possibly be any better, or you assume basic things you wish it would do can't be done, !xyWiz will startle you. (And if some !xyWiz component has disappointed you in the past, the current version will come as a happy surprise.)

An installer for XyWrite for Windows (16-bit) running under modern Windows

XyWrite documentation (Mostly XyWrite III+)

XyWrite as delivered by the factory is notoriously under documented, particularly with regard to some implementation notions (such as 3 byte encoded data characters) that one really needs to understand to use XyWrite well. Over time, Herbert Tyson's superb "XyWrite Revealed" book, and a number of excellent notes by Carl Distefano and Robert Holmgren have been extremely useful in filling the documentation void.

I have been working on my own set of notes concerning these implementation details. My notes differ considerably in approach from Tyson's, Distefano's, and Homgren's works in that they attempt to rationalize how and why things in the implementation got to be the way they are. For me, and presumably some readers who are like me, a how-it-got-that-way approach makes things easier to understand and remember. Other will no doubt find the prevailing Tyson/Distefano/Homgren works more to their liking. Some may find value in reading both

This note describes XyWrite III+ in some detail, with emphasis on (a) its overall architecture and on "internals," and (b) its "macro"/programming/automation facilities. The target audience is threefold: (1) XyWrite III+ users who want more understanding, mostly of XyWrite XPL programming, (2) others who have never used XyWrite, and "wonder what the fuss is/was all about," and (3) myself -- since nothing clarifies one's thoughts about a given topic as trying to explain the topic to someone else. //

XyWrite III+ is a product that many users still feel is the best writing tool they have ever experienced. But, due to some misestimation by XyQuest (XyWrite's developer) as to how much MS Windows would damage the DOS applications market, plus an untimely, misguided, and costly partnership between XyQuest and IBM at about the time Windows was emerging, XyQuest failed at about the time MS Windows emerged. XyWrite development largely ceased soon thereafter.

In my view, many of the concepts that made XyWrite great have never been articulated, and many of them died when XyQuest died. This note attempts to explore and lay out some of those concepts, in a way that they might be appreciated even by someone who has never used the product, in the hope that some of these concepts might emerge in some measure in future "word processing" software. This hope, however, is perhaps a rather slim one -- nothing will make a person into a XyWrite fan as much as actually using the product will.

XyWrite is a word processor for MS-DOS and Windows modeled on the mainframe-based ATEX typesetting system. Popular with writers and editors for its speed and degree of customization, XyWrite was in its heyday the house word processor in many editorial offices, including the New York Times from 1989 to 1993. XyWrite was developed by David Erickson and marketed by XyQuest from 1982 through 1992, after which it was acquired by The Technology Group. The final version for MS-DOS was 4.18 (1993); for Windows, 4.13. An offshoot descendant of XyWrite called Nota Bene is still being actively developed.