Your solution and further response helps a lot and as a result you have motivated me to press on with Tkx as the concept of it being a thin wrapper giving almost direct access to TK is a compelling one. >you can always write stuff in tcl, unofficially Tkx::eval('tcl source code'); That looks like a real life-saver in these sort of situations 'cos the documentation re Tk is ok. All in all...very grateful to you. Thank you!