>Is there any way to issue more than one command when assigning it to the ON KEY command without directing it to run a procedure of commands elsewhere? can you issue more than one command on the same ON KEY command?

You can concatenate function calls, if that helps:

on key label alt-shift-z =date(), time(), sin(3.14), myudf()

They all get executed, and the results discarded. This way of calling a bunch of functions was introduced in FP2.0 and I always thought there may be some use for it, apart from obfuscation. Still works.