@all Thank you all for taking the time and secondly for the many helpful hints and pieces of advice. As most of you will have guessed I'm not a programmer but a network engineer in an ISP surrounding so any references to other languages will be lost on me. I only know a little perl and even less bash scripting =). I have set up dir based version control as suggested, svn may not be installed on the server. I will change open, VAR and function naming and formatting as suggested. I will also get rid of redundant #-style formatting as pointed out. And The print here reference is very helpful too. Regarding the function calling I chose to call module-based functions without leading & and vice versa. I will change that too though. Once I have implemented all of the above I will try and work out a more sub'ed style and present the new and hopefully improved version. font (FixedSys) is what vim.common defaulted to in size 9 @1600x900. Format works in vi on Solaris too with the same display settings, also in FullHD on ubuntu in vim.common.