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.