Thanks for all the comments so far. Take note I do not want to start a language war on the GUI front. I did some research yesterday. Firstly google points me a some nice articles from http://www.codeproject.com written in VC++ and VB. I got exactly what I want for the console output redirect and I think I can use that as a good start. This will be a Windows only solution. Anyway I need to learn a bit on Windows GUI programming as well. Interestingly, later I called my brother who is a Visual C++ programmer at Creative Technology (the soundcard make) and he told me he just finished an assignment for his M.Sc. computer graphics course using the same thing for a GUI wrapper of a console program. I've also downloaded AutoIt and will give it a try later. Then I added Linux to the google search keywords, tk/python/gtk are the top hits. Since gtk/gtk+ seems to be difficult for me, Python with tk seem to be a good option. I will try this route as the preferred cross-platform solution. For the other brother who is a Unix programmer but without much GUI programming experience, I will recommend GTK+/WxWidgets to him as he is good at C++. Thanks again for all the helps and I will report my progress once I have done the simple GUI wrapper for xwisp2 and pk2 (Linux/Windows program to drive PICkit 2). Regards, Xiaofan -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist