No toolbar or speed buttons
— Keyboard oriented, with the mouse as a roving key

EWriter has no toolbars, speed buttons, or clickable glyphs. That alone might incline some to think the textwriter is as ancient as a typewriter, at least. EWriter has been conceived (designed) for the writer coming from an old Underwood stand-up, but heading into the 21st century and ewriting. The orientational center lies in typing on the bulky center of the keyboard. The typewriter keyboard is under the writer’s hands. But there is a new kind of reaching for all those newer keys: Shift and special keys to the sides. Function keys above. Navigation Pad to the right and Number pad still farther to the right. (In eWriter, there will be a Format Pad to the right as well.)

Using keys, the writer can access menus, submenus, menu items. In effect, the menu items are keys or key-combinations. Using his or her hand, the writer reaches for, say, a function key or an Alt+NumPad# key-combination. Using the mouse, he or she can reach for any menu item.

Is this just a way of talking about what everybody does, working the menus with a mouse? No, it is a way of fitting meaningful actions into an oriented frame of mind. It is also a way to identify what doesn't fit. The speedbuttons look like keys. However, toolbars (with their buttons) are graphic layouts. They take the user’s orientation away from text and language. Even when working with Web pages, in eWriter you will write them, not lay them out. The buttons look like keys; the menu items, pieces of text, feel like (typewriter) keys. The goal is to feel as if you’re writing as you did with a pen and then a typewriter. Now, it’s with a textwriter.

Orientation and frame of mind don’t enter into understanding why a radio program has an audience and a television program viewers. But why, then, did Shakespeare and the playwrights write for audiences, not watchers? The play, visual aspects included, was written, was a language-construct, was something, in a large sense, ...to be heard by listening, language-directed watchers.

Extensible punctuation & tagging as punctuating

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