Btw, before you maybe start hacking anything, you should probably have a look at the Hurd console shared memory interface which looks quite nice: cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/cvsroot/hurd co hurd see hurd/hurd/console.h, and brltty's Hurd screen driver. There are missing features (like support for combining accents that do not have a precombined form) but it could be a good source of ideas. Samuel