thanks. i'm on Windows though and slightly fascist and unreasonable in that i'm not particularly worried about the program working on another platform. i should have mentioned that though. (also i think if anyone needs a noob-oriented IDE, it's going to be Windows users)
The same system should work for windows. Windows does support named pipes, and you don't have to use unix shell code to launch the arc process, since you're writing another program anyway.
Yes, but anyone running Windows is much less likely to use emacs or vim over some gui ide. Linux users are much more likely to be willing to learn those two.