in reply to Any free perl editors?
I use Midnight Commander. It has nice syntax highlighting for perl, is easy to use, and is real handy for testing because after you edit your script, you can run the script just by hitting enter on it, and you can quickly see any output files, etc. No doubt, that vi(vim) is more powerful, but it is much more cryptic to learn.
In your situation, the mc built-in editor mcedit (F4 button), displays word count, current word, line count, and current line in it's status display. It has alot of shortcut keys, <Meta -l> will prompt for which line to go to. The Meta key is <escape> on most systems I've seen. So hit <escape l> then 300, to go to line 300.
MC 's built in curses file-directory manager is sweet to use. You can move files around quite easily, and do all sorts of file operations with it. It is quite nice to have one interface to learn to do almost everything you need, move files, launch apps, edit files, even hex editing. (Although it may be a bad habit, since you start depending on mc, and loose those command line skills ....I always have to read "man rename" everytime I need to use rename, because mc's <shift-F6> makes it so easy)
And as a bonus, you can tell mc to use vi, instead of it's internal editor if you want.
Try mc to hack, you will never go back. :-)
I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh