Re: Program Writer Problem

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Simon D. Williams wrote:
> Here's something I just came across that's a bit puzzling:
> I'm using the ProDOS version of Program Writer on a IIgs and I can't get 
> the line copy/paste function to work.
> I'm using the full EDITOR (not EDITOR.SMALL) and when I hit OA-! it just 
> beeps at me. It's not a big program (~24K free memory). It's a bit 
> frustrating as I'd really like to be able to copy blocks of code between 
> programs, but doing it one line at a time is murder (OA-C and OA-P work 
> fine).
>
> Any ideas?

I've also had some nasty crashes when copying and pasting between
programs.  It's been unpredictable enough that I stopped using it.
I suspect that Program Writer doesn't play well with some of the
utilities I keep resident (like the "cd" command and NadaNet ;-),
though I seem to remember problems even before they were loaded.

Instead, I load the program that has the code fragment I want, delete
everything else, renumber it to a convenient range, then OA-Q out of
Program Writer and EXEC MAKE.TXT (using the dash command), which is a
short text file that adds the usual OPEN/WRITE/LIST/CLOSE stuff to the
front of the program fragment in memory (lines < 100), then RUN to
generate the text file of the fragment.

Then I load the program I'm working on and EXEC in the text file to
add the lines I want, && into Program Writer, and edit away.

It takes longer to say it than to do it, and I probably don't find
myself doing it more than once every week or two, so it's OK.

-michael

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