for prompts that currently appear in the mini-buffer? I was using a commercial editor today called Epsilon that very faithfully mimics xemacs functionality and keybinds. Anyway, when I invoked its version of EPS mode, instead of inverting the screen to get the password, it popped up a dialog box. The important part was that when I used its shell mode, it also popped up a dialog box - that meant that I did NOT get every command echo'ed back at me, as does happen if I run a command in the shell buffer that triggers the (invert-the-screen-get-the-password) mode. -- Matthew O. Persico "If you were supposed to understand it, we wouldn't call it code."