Jan Vroonhof writes: it means (quote from http://www.best.com/~falconer/Widgets/#xaw3d, by Edward Falk) "The beNiceToColormap flag is the most important. You need to set this to False in order to obtain a decent 3-d look. Without it, Xaw3d will try to give a 3-d appearance with 1-bit patterns, which don't look very good." on the other side, it means also that up to 3n colors may be allocated in place of n, and this is a potential problem in 8bit displays... now that configure searches Xaw3d and XEmacs is built against it, may i say in the 90% of cases, what i'd like to see it's some lines in "sample.Xdefaults", explaining the reasons of Xaw3d widgets' ugliness, and how to obviate the problem