Postscript from humble supplicant: I examined Text.pm (see Re: re: for Reply #1) and noted that for manual selections it uses (e.g. for 'select all'): 
$t->tagAdd('sel', '1.0', 'end');

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So I tried it. It didn't work. Now how could Text.pm get by with this and not my program?

To make a long story short, it turns out not to be manual selection that wakes up the select mechanism, but any manual activity (including a single mouse click) in the text area. And when manual activity takes place, the widget has the focus. So I tried forcing the issue with the focus method: 

$t = $mw->ROText(-foo => 'bar' etc.)->pack;
$t->focus;

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It worked! I use it once at the beginning of the program, before calling MainLoop. It appears sufficient to activate the selection mechanism for the duration of the program.

In reply to RE: Waking up text select by Anonymous Monk
in thread Waking up text select by Anonymous Monk

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