I'd love to use Tk - but I'm writing a UI that needs to run over a simple socket protocal - doesn't have to be true telnet, but that's the idea. (Auto plant where I work wants to use putty to telnet into the VLS cluster which runs our MRP system (also written in perl - and runs on a four-node MySQL cluster)) Anyway, the point of making our own canvas is to run it over a socket in text mode - unless Tk does some funky text mode that I don't know about.