Andy Piper wrote: Andy, I certainly don't think you are stupid. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to do what you're doing! And you have done quite a lot of good work. In this case, though, you really don't seem to understand the difference between implementation and interface. Your goal is to hide the implementational detail of using gutters to implement dialog frames, and if your first attempt fails, like it did, by all means *dont* just give up and expose all the guts, as in `make-gutter-only-dialog-frame'; just see if you can come up with a better way that still meets your goal. For example: (1) Instead of passing in the actual glyph spec or glyph, pass in a function of two args (the dialog frame and its parents), which when called, creates and returns the appropriate glyph. (2) [Better] Provide a way for callbacks to determine where they were invoked at. This is much more general and is what you should really do. For example, have the code that calls the callbacks bind some global variables such as widget-callback-current-glyph and widget-callback-current-channel, which contain the glyph whose callback is being invoked, and the window or frame of the glyph (depending on where the glyph is) where the invocation actually happened. That way, the callbacks can easily figure out the dialog box and its parent, and not have to worry about embedding it in at creation time. In this case, perhaps not, because isearch is special; but in the majority of cases, we will be writing dialog boxes to replace reading from the minibuffer, and in those cases everything maps cleanly. -- Ben In order to save my hands, I am cutting back on my mail. I also write as succinctly as possible -- please don't be offended. If you send me mail, you _will_ get a response, but please be patient, especially for XEmacs-related mail. If you need an immediate response and it is not apparent in your message, please say so. Thanks for your understanding. See also http://www.666.com/ben/typing.html.