Historically, both Apple (in their Classic Mac) and Microsoft put a lot of resources into perfecting the aesthetics and the user-friendliness of their windowing and user interface widget design. The community of companies and organization's that developed the various UNIX O.S.'s did not concentrate their resources in this area and their main windowing and widget system, Motif, reflects this. IDL has used Motif for its widget architecture, because it is an interface that is universally available on all UNIX platforms. Its sudden availability on Mac abour 4 years ago was what made it possible for IDL and many other software packages to financially justify continuing supporting Mac after nearly dropping that O.S. from their lists of supported platforms. Other options to Motif are becoming more universally available on all UNIX platforms, I suspect that the IDL user interface development team is experimenting with such, and I would expect to see IDL embrace an alternative in the next year or so. Regarding editing keys, the pulldown Edit menu on the IDLDE shows Alt-c, Alt-v, etc., as options for copying, pasting, etc. Don't those work for you? They work on my desktop Mac 10.4.8. Finally, the full version of IDL For Mac OS X has the identical interface to the Student Edition. It is better because it has all the additional functionality of version 6.3 IDL (Student Edition is version 6.2 IDL), but you would not notice differences in the aesthetics of the IDLDE or its widget toolkit.