$t->bind('Tk::Text', '<Control-s>', \&save_file);
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That worked great! thank you. It seems it is always the small things that are getting me these days.

Just a note: converters method of doing this binding is specific to just that widget, while Rogers method can be used if one wants to affect that binding on ALL Tk::Text widgets. I think it is an important difference, ie, if you had 2 Text Widgets and only wanted that key binding on a specific widget in your main window... you should use converters. ++ to both of you though

Without seeing your code it's difficult to guess what you're doing wrong, but in a nutshell, you should bind a callback to the parent MainWindow, for example:

use Tk;
$mw = tkinit;
$mw->Text->pack;
$mw->bind('<Control-s>', sub { print "save something...\n" });
MainLoop;
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The parent widget gets the keyboard input and responds to it instead of passing the event to the Text widget. If this doesn't fix the problem or doesn't address the right problem, post a snippet of code that shows what you're trying to do.

I made a mistake here. When the Text widget has focus, the C-s character is still inserted. After re-reading the docs, it looks like the best approach for an instance binding would be something like:

use Tk;

$mw = tkinit;
$t1 = $mw->Text->pack;
$t1->bind('<Control-s>', sub { print "foo\n\n"; $_[0]->break });
# the order of bindtags is:
# class name (Tk::Text), window name, ancestral toplevel, "all"
# this modifies the tag list so that the instance binding,
# which includes a call to break(), has higher priority
# than the class binding
$t1->bindtags([($t1->bindtags)[1,0,2,3]]);

MainLoop;
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converter