Ok, thanks guys. I'm going to see what I can do with it now.

"you can't use mfc controls in a directx window."

I did not even think about that. Thanks for mentioning. This is going to be pretty tricky then I guess. I have one cool idea though. Maybe I could make a separate, free floating text box inside it's own little window, where the user can type/edit text freely, like in a standard windows program. Then hitting the "Send" button, or pressing enter could pass the string to the main application? That may be more trouble than it's even worth though. Just a thought. I think it could be pretty cool though, especially with a feature to dock/undock it from the main window, drag it around, etc.

I know I COULD do this copy/paste thing, in an extremely complicated way; maybe by getting the mouse_pos vector when the button is clicked, measuring where it is dragged to before it's release, and then determining which characters in TEXT objects should highlight, and so on... But that really seems ridiculous for a small project like this. I'm trying not to make it too outrageous. Plus, I'd probably go and do all of that, then find out there was a very easy way to do it that I overlooked (happens to me often!).

I'll also look at the stuff in the SDK and see if anything fits the bill. I think this will be really cool if I can get it done!