Regarding my previous post, about Forth and a GUI with GUIgen, for VFX Forth... The part that's a real bummer is that you can't just approach programming modern Forth GUIs without knowing how to program the GUI toolkit in C/C++, be it using win32api or GTK.

Not that you have to, but the documentation the Forth vendors have written expect you to have previous experience with the C programming side of it.

This is one of those things that sort of put people off Forth. You want  to program in Forth, but you still have to mess with C, even though you might actually hate it, but that's only because so much stuff out there just assumes you know C, that there's no way around it.

This hampers Forth in its potential to be the first programming language one learns. The entry point is actually as a second programming language. In this regard, if you look at the embedded crowd, you'll actually see that Forth is still around.

Anyways, the gist of this post is to get you up to speed with getting acquainted with the win32api. I realize this is a topic that's fallen out of fashion, but you don't care about that, do you? What you want is to get the job done, i.e., write a Forth application with a GUI.

I think these two tutorials are pretty good. The first one is more conceptual, and the second one is very detailed, with all the minutia you need.

Reliable Software's win32api tutorial

FunctionX win32api programming

PS: I just shecked SwitfForth's install, and learned that they have a pretty good manual, not as thorough as MPE's, for Windows GUI programming, but you need to install their implementation first, then look in the \doc directory.