@federico: You can execute anything in Npp with the NppExec Plugin (and I guess you will do that for animator, too). See this link for installation instructions+intro and that link (last post) for a sample script (in most environments I use, it would be important to set COB_COPY_DIR before executing cobc). While PSPad is nice (especially the log parser [leading you to the cobol source lines of cobc's messages] - if you find anything like that for NPP, please let me know) and has most features "out-of-the-box", it has some disturbing bugs.

Simon 'human' Sobisch