i have tried to find an answer to this question on this board, because i don't think it's unique, but i haven't been able to find a thread along these lines. i am used to using idl in a linux environment, with one command line terminal and a text editor. in this way i could copy text from the editor and run it at the command line. i was hopeful that idlde, with it's shift+F8 shortcut, would make running code more simple. however, i can't get it to function as i would expect. when i select and run the following text: for x=0,3 do begin print,x print,'hello' endforit prints "4", "hello" and then the endfor gives a syntax error. in other words, the commands within the for loop never seem to run, at least within the loop. i've also preceded this code with a ".run" and followed it with "end" and it acted as if nothing had been typed within the .run command. when i paste that same code (with the .run call) into a linux/dos idl command prompt it acts "properly", printing 0, 1, 2 and 3, separated by "hello" lines. i think the issue is something in the way the idlde command prompt recognizes the end of a line because i can get it to execute properly if i end each line with "&$", or if i execute (or copy/paste) each line individually, rather than as a group of lines. obviously those shortcuts are simple for this 4-line example, but become more excruciating for larger code chunks. so how can i get loops to execute as i would anticipate using idlde? am i missing something fundamental. thanks in advance for any guidance. gh