Anyone who has worked with WordStar for any length of time has
probably had the misfortune of deleting the wrong line or block
of text. By some fancy manuevering, you might be able to recover
the text from your backup file. If you have a photographic
memory, you may be able to retype it in no time. But if these do
not work, you should be set for a frustating time trying to
reconstruct your lost data. Now you can avoid this problem
altogether by adding a "Yankback" feature to WordStar. This can
be done quite simply with a series of command strings ("macros")
which I call "WS Yankback," set up in a key definition program.
(The more popular commercial key definition programs such as
Smartkey, Xtrakey and the Backgrounder have been reviewed by
Glenn Grant in the December 1985 issue of PROFILES. KSSTROKES
4.0, QWIKEY21, & GKEY2 are public domain programs which give
good, but more limited results.)
HOW TO SET UP WS YANKBACK
FIRST, set up four macros which will now be used to delete text
in place of their WordStar counterparts. The first will delete a
line. The second will delete a block of text. The third deletes
text left of the cursor; the fourth deletes text right of the
cursor. All macros should be entered as continuous text without
spaces. The ^ symbol is the control key, held down while you
type the key which follows it; <cr> is a carriage return (or ^M).
THIRD, on your WordStar disk, open a file named "YANKEE." This
is where your deleted text will be stored. This file will be
overwritten every time you delete text, so it does not matter
what you type in it--a single character will do. But make sure
that you have adequate disk space for any text you may want to
delete (2K-6K should be plenty for most operations).
Now, when you want to delete a line, use macro #1. It works just
like ^Y: place the cursor anywhere on a line and use it to delete
the entire line. If you want to yank back the deleted line,
execute macro #5. When deleting a block of text, use macro #2 in
the same way you would use ^KY. Mark the beginning and end of
the block with ^KB and ^KK respectively, and execute macro #2 to
delete the marked block. If the block needs to be recovered,
macro #5 will yank it back. Numbers 3 and 4 work like ^Q<del>
and ^QY--only now the deleted text can be retrieved with the
yankback command. (Macro #1 leaves a blank line where the text
has been removed. If this is undesirable simple omit the ^S
after the ^X.)
Before using WS Yankback, be sure to test it thoroughly. If
there are errors in the way the macros were entered you could
lose more text than you planned to delete, and not be able to
recover it. Use a practice file and check all of the commands.
If they do not work, carefully recheck the macros to make sure
they have been entered correctly.
N.B. The yankback command WILL NOT WORK if you use ^Y, ^KY,
^Q<del> or ^QY to delete text. The four macros given above must
be used instead of these WordStar commands for the yankback to
recover the deleted text.
HOW WS YANKBACK WORKS
WS Yankback simply writes the deleted text onto the file named
YANKEE, and then deletes it from the working text. When the
yankback is used, the text is read back into your file at the
present position of the cursor. This operation takes some time,
which is its major drawback. When deleting blocks of text,
however, it may be worth the extra time to have the assurance
that the data can be recovered. Since WS Yankback always writes
the deleted line on the text YANKEE, the recovery operation will
ONLY WORK FOR THE LAST DELETION--you cannot retrieve any
materials deleted before the last text was deleted.
WHAT ABOUT ^Y ?
If you decide to use the first macro in place of ^Y, you may find
that you still have problems with ^Y. You may accidentally hit
^Y when you want a ^T, or you may attempt to type an upper case
"Y" (which, believe or not, I use quite often) and hit the
control key instead of the shift key. I have solved this problem
by following Ted Silveira's advice in PROFILES, July/August 1985,
p. 44. Using DDT (etc.) or Winstall's custom patch "+" (which
does not appear on the options menu), you may change address 054D
(0535 in WordStar 3.0) to read "19 19" (hex) instead of "19 00."
The result is that it now takes TWO ^Ys (or ^YY) to delete a
line, minimizing the possibilities for an accident. Now when a
^Y is hit by mistake, the space bar will get you out of the
partially executed command. If you find yourself rapidly typing
two or more ^Ts without looking at either the keyboard or the
results onscreen, you may want to try Melvyn Halbert's solution,
found on the Tampa Bay KUG board (813-791-1454). He suggests
changing the "19" at the appropriate address to "1C" (hex), which
will reassign the delete line function to ^\ instead of ^Y.
nging the "19" at the
