If you read my original post, you'd know why I wasn't satisfied with an editor command: lack of console environment. Editor is GUI. Unlike X, you don't have the console that started the graphical program still connected to stdout. Instead, the Win32 system has a somewhat different context. I've published a couple articles in the COBB Group journals on those differences and how programs can mix&match. Piping stdout to a pipe isn't right either, because Win32 doesn't have pseudoterminals and the program can sense that it's not really the console. The C RTL, for example, turns on buffering.