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The 12th Anniversary of Yeah Write! the Easy to Use Writing Tool

Others/Miscelleneous by BillHill @ 2008-06-30

Yeah Write is a paradigmatic, small, fast writing tool that has eased my efforts for years. Let´s see how it has progressed over those years. WordPace is celebrating the 12th anniversary of YW! this year.

Paradigm Shift & Creating/Editing

Paradigm Shift:

YW! is designed to a much different paradigm than most of the word processing programs with which we are familiar. The document management uses the “file drawer” metaphor - each family member could have his/her own drawer or drawers (each drawer corresponds to a subfolder of the YW folder) named suitably for each. And within the “drawers” each type of document (which corresponds to the Tabs across the top of the main YW! window - see some of the screen shots) has its own data file and index file.

When you first open YW!, what you are presented with depends on how you last left it when you exited.

Above shows the “General” Tab with an open editing window.

If you are a bit AR [anal retentive - meaning that you save your files by clicking the “Save” button (even though YW! saves your docs automatically whenever you pause in your editing for a few seconds) and closed the drawer via the “File” menu on your way out], you will see the Drawer view where you can click on the Drawer you want to open (each drawer can have a password if you want, but if you do set a password, some of the ease of use is sacrificed for the security). After a drawer is chosen, the main window with the Tabs will be set to the Tab you last used with the list of the documents of that type and the cursor will be on the last document you worked on.

Above shows my old General Tab docs list.

Each document in the list will have a descriptive entry rather than an obscure file name and you can either choose one of the existing documents to edit/update or you can select to create a new document of that type. Or you can choose another Tab to edit or create a different type of document. The cursor on that tab will also be on the last doc you worked on of that type if any. On the other hand, if you are a more of a freestyle person and leave your document open and just click the X (or use the [Alt]-[F4] shortcut) to close YW!, when you next run YW, it will still open with the cursor exactly where you left off in the doc on which you were working - if your drawer is passworded, just enter your pass and you’ll still be exactly where you were when you clicked the X. YW! saves the cursor location with each doc, so when you open any doc, you will be right where you left it. I really love that feature!

Creating/Editing:

Once you have chosen a doc to edit or [New] to create a new one, the editing window will open which is pre-formatted for that type of document: if it is a letter, it will have fields to enter the From and To address block info, etc. and the signature block at the bottom; on the General Tab, the format just has a Description field and an unformatted text entry block (I use this Tab for all my “creative” writing), though an Outlining feature is available in some Tabs for those who find it helpful.

Above shows this review in progress.

You use the [Tab] key to move among the entry fields and [Ctrl]-[Tab] to put a tab into the text (another choice of the way the [Tab] key works is available where [Tab] inserts a tab and [Ctrl]-[Tab] moves among the fields - add the [Shift] key to move in the reverse direction, like this [Shift]-[Tab]). Users will find many of the standard control code shortcuts that originated with WordStar work just as always like the diamond for cursor movement, [Ctrl]-B for bold, etc. Plus there are other keyboard shortcuts noted in YW!’s menus. A “User’s Guide” with coverage of all of its features is under the “YW Info” Tab. You can also hide Tabs you don’t use and create new Tabs and sub-Tabs (in the Full version), so if you wanted to write books, you could create a new Tab called “Books”, a sub-tab for each book and each chapter could be a separate line (doc) on the Tab index. While if you find you never use tabs like: Diary, Faxes, or Memos, you can hide them to unclutter the main window. The editing window is separately re-sizable so you can see the Tab view window behind the editing window (as seen in several of the screen shots) if you want.

The pic above shows a sample letter in progress.

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