>I'm gonna have to reread everything cause I don't know what you are doing then. If it's not allowing you to launch like notepad from explorer for a prg or its not using a different text editor within vfp which I thought vfp allows for in tools/options or somewhere to use a different editor I missed it.

No need to re-read all of that, let me summarize for you. What I wanna do is double click on a .prg and have *VFP* fire up and edit the program. That gives you syntax coloring, compile, run, etc right from the IDE. Firing up Notepad forces you to edit outside of the IDE.

...kt