I had asked Merlyn about that a few days ago and he had made an off hand suggestion that you change the shell for cron from vi to Perl. I could not do it in my case but you might be able to do something like that.

As far as adding and removing entries you will need to have access (A login) to the cron you want to edit. Generally every login account has a crontab that can be listed by crontab -l or edited by crontab -e. There is a way for the administrator (root) to add the crontabs to a group that you are a member of then you could use Perl to edit the flat files and then the admin would need to do a crontab -e then a write to update the crontab. There is no easy way to do it. I am currently developing a Tk interface that will allow you to edit any cron but you will still need to know the password for the account you want to work with.

Sparky
FMTEYEWTK