One of Picotron's features is that it can read the keyboard keys, but because the escape key is used to quit the currently-running program, it appears to be unavailable for making applications that respond to keypresses of the Escape key (say, to cancel an operation, dismiss a dialog box, interrupt some in-game process, etc.).

It seems to me that once the app is exported into a standalone app (as mentioned in the FAQ), the escape key (perhaps) can be safely captured and responded to in that context. Anyone know if we'll be able to read the escape key in standalone games? And if so, how do we get the development system to "play nice" with that so it can be developed and tested?

podtree.p64, map.p64 and gui_ed.lua (the text/code editor widget) seem to capture escape keypresses by passing capture_escapes=true to window calls, and yield it back by calling it again with false.

Note that calling window multiple times won't make you create multiple windows but instead will make you communicate with the window manager to change info about your window or program (like event handling as seen here).

That worked like a charm! Thanks!