Thats the way to do it, you have to put in those "hours of experimenting" to get results. It's like exercising, the muscles only grow if you do the workouts. :-)

I'll look at this later, and see if I see something. I would suggest that you post this to the newsgroup comp.lang.perl.tk , because Jack D. (who maintains the text widget) is a regular there, amoung others who have deep insight into overriding things. Generally, in your type of problem, you would create your own "special text widget", say called "MyText.pm", or a package in your script. It is a common procedure called Derived, read "perldoc Tk::Derived". An easy example is Making a derived Tk::Text object. So look at the source code for Text.pm and see which sub you want to change.