Any good Perl Editors for Linux?

perleager has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by jeffa (Bishop) on May 05, 2006 at 19:57 UTC
It seems like the majority of programmers who use Linux pick one of two editors: emacs or vim. Both have their pros and cons, but the bottom line is you have to invest time to learn how to use them. I prefer vim, but you simply can't learn vim in 2 hours (it took me about 2 or 3 months to reach a fairly proficient/productive level with vim). If you plan on doing more research into vi, you might find this node of use: .vimrc for perl programmers. jeffa L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L-- -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B-- H---H---H---H---H---H--- (the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)	[reply]
Re^2: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by blazar (Canon) on May 10, 2006 at 12:51 UTC
It seems like the majority of programmers who use Linux pick one of two editors: emacs or vim. OTOH I use jed: a lightweight emacs clone which comes with CUA-like keybinding out of the box - to activate them is just a matter of uncommenting a line in `~/.jedrc`; and they're deeply etched in my cortex...	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by derby (Abbot) on May 05, 2006 at 19:56 UTC
Commence the editor wars ... but seriously the two big editors (vim and emacs) both support color coding and I'm not sure what the heck an "easy navigation panel" is. -derby	[reply]
Re^2: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by fishbot_v2 (Chaplain) on May 05, 2006 at 20:49 UTC
I'll second the vim.	[reply]
Re^2: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by jzb (Hermit) on May 05, 2006 at 20:34 UTC
I second the Emacs...	[reply]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by Herkum (Parson) on May 05, 2006 at 19:52 UTC
The editor I prefer is Komodo from Activestate. They have a port for Linux and Windows, though the Linux port has some quirks. I did find it easier to work with than trying to learn vim from scratch. It is $30 for a personal License however, but I found that I have gotten my money's worth from it...	[reply]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by Argel (Prior) on May 05, 2006 at 20:46 UTC
You should check out the Perl Development Tools Editor/IDE comparison chart to find the answers you seek. With that said, I'm amazed that vi/vim and emacs are being so highly recommended. Both are complex and hard to learn. Given that you are currently going to be a "casual" Linux user neither seem appropriate. [ Though learning some basic vi/vim might be a good idea if you expect more exposre to UNIX/Linux/BSD environments as it is usually the only editor you can safely assume will be there. ] Some editors that would (imo) be more suitable are the underrated NEdit, the very popular EPIC (which also runs on Windows), and for KDE desktop users the popular KDevelop. Based on your post I would suggest you give NEdit a try first (good feature set and it should be easy to install).	[reply]
Re^2: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by cls (Initiate) on May 07, 2006 at 19:16 UTC
Learning vi is a worthwhile investment for any developer. It's the editor you can assume will be just about anywhere, (You might have to bring it with you.) Learn vi before vim, so you don't become dependent on vim-specific enhancements. Start here. http://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/usd/12.vi/paper.html Ignore the obsolete stuff about teletypes, broken character terminals, and slow modems, and it's pretty short. And it starts you on the right track: visual edit commands are all <operator><count><cursor-motion>, not a whole bunch of arbitrary things to memorize. If you go at it that way, and they tell you where ex(1) ends and vi(1) begins, vim actually makes some sense. Among the vim\|elvis enhancements, "left click" became just another cursor motion (unfortunately it doesn't like <count>) and "center click" a synonym for paste, but the language underneath stayed the same.	[reply]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by explorer (Chaplain) on May 05, 2006 at 20:21 UTC
View Perl Development Tools; also.	[reply]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by cowboy (Friar) on May 05, 2006 at 20:00 UTC
Personally, I use vim, Debians vim-perl package is nice. It includes gtk2 for the gui, and includes the ability to write your macros in perl. You may want to check out the IDE section on freshmeat which contains a large number of possible editors, some of which may fit very closely with what you are used to on windows.	[reply]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by ruzam (Curate) on May 05, 2006 at 20:40 UTC
Based on where you're coming from... You're probably using the KDE window manager. It has a couple of fine built in editors, kwrite and kate. kwrite is a single file editor, kate is more of a 'project' tool that lets you work with multiple files at once. Both do colour code highlighting and smart enought to figure out what type of code you're working on. Short of tabbed file selections and auto-completion you'll probably find kate is pretty close to what you've been using (just not very media/network aware). You could also try Quanta (also part of KDE) which is targetted more towards HTML writers (and even closer to what CuteHTML does). But Quanta comes with some serious bloat (and far to many bugs) for pure coding.	[reply]
Re^2: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by Anonymous Monk on May 10, 2006 at 12:15 UTC
Kate is the best! And unlike the emacs and vim weenies, it actually complies with CUA.	[reply]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by Arunbear (Prior) on May 05, 2006 at 21:56 UTC
Scite has syntax highlighting, abbreviations, autocompletion, knows how to invoke Perl out of the box, is scriptable in Lua etc ... very cool.	[reply]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by wazoox (Prior) on May 06, 2006 at 14:26 UTC
I'll repeat myself but I'd go for NEdit. It uses the standard keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-x/c/v cut,copy,paste, ctrl-o/s/q Open,Save,quit, etc) and is as expandable as anything else. I've written Perl autocompletion macros for nedit you'll find easily on the nedit wiki. Vi and emacs are tools worth knowing about, but they enforce whole new paradigms and shortcuts (they're available for windows, too).	[reply]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by GrandFather (Saint) on May 05, 2006 at 20:52 UTC
You might take a quick look at t-pad on CPAN. It's fairly light weight Perl editor (written in Perl that is) with Perl colour syntax highlighting. I've not used it much at all, I happened upon it yesterday when I was pokint around that corner of CPAN. If you are prepared to spend a small amount of money I'd second the motion for Komodo. It has a pretty good editor with colour syntax highlighting (and much more), but no spelling checking. It has rather nice project management and snippet handling. DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel	[reply]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by spiritway (Vicar) on May 06, 2006 at 18:43 UTC
There are a couple of HTML editors available for Linux. One is called "BlueFish". The other is Quanta +. They each have pros and cons, but they are fairly OK for using if you're new to Linux. They each have a layout that resembles CuteHTML, at least superficially. You probably won't get too homesick. There is also KDevelop, which is a multi-language editor that you could set up for HTML. It's a decent program, but I think it's overkill if you're only interested in HTML. OTOH, if you're also likely to be programming in some other language (oh, let's take Perl as a completely random example), it might be worth learning the various features. Much depends on how much time you care to spend on learning. It's not altogether obvious how things work in KDevelop. As for vi vs. emacs - these two editors are fine, as far as they go. There is a fairly steep learning curve for each. I do not recommend them as replacements for CuteHTML, though they are useful text editors for other purposes. Update:It would help if I read the whole question. I missed the OP's important reference to using his editor to write Perl programs. I am duly penitent.	[reply]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by hesco (Deacon) on May 06, 2006 at 08:27 UTC
For folks new to the command line, I usually recommend nano or pico as being easy to learn, with a menu of options visible at the bottom of the screen. But I made the switch to vim a few years ago and have never looked back. It will give you perl (and php and sql and probably others) aware syntax highlighting with a simple well documented configuration. There are fantastic tutorials that will have you up and doing useful work in less than an hour. And its colon (:) prompt is a great place to hone your regex skills (although its a slightly different flavor than the perl regex). Before I settled on vim, I was looking for a gui based IDE and watched Quanta for a while, hoping they might do for perl what they offered back then for php. Its a pretty full featured package with tie ins to cvs, diff, etc. But I have't used it and would trust others here who described it as buggy. I just installed scite and its looks like a really nice package. I think I may try it out. You can get everything you mention above at a command line (dcd or workbone for playing cd's), syntax highlighting (vim, my favorite, or emacs), spellcheck (with ispell). Vim is well worth the learning curve and as explained elsewhere in response to your question, is a great fail safe b/c it is installed everywhere. (Or at least vi is). But given where you are coming from, you may be more comfortable with scite or kate or even quanta. -- Hugh if( $lal && $lol ) { $life++; }	[reply]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by xorl (Deacon) on May 05, 2006 at 20:58 UTC
xemacs As you've probably guessed by now, there is a huge array of editors out there. I like xemacs b/c it is a not only a text editor, but so much more! It is a fork from emacs, but in a good direction.	[reply]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by zentara (Archbishop) on May 06, 2006 at 11:43 UTC
Have you discovered Midnight Commander( 'mc') yet? It's default internal editor does a very nice job of color-syntax highlighting perl. Just hit F4 on the file. It's only drawback is it dosn't support utf-8 yet( it is promised in the next release), but it is very easy to use. You can switch to a black background too, I'll post my color scheme if you want to try it. If you are running it in an xterm, do a control-right-mouse-click on the xterm, you can select font size. I like huge. Another couple of editors with nice Perl syntax highlighting, are cooledit and nedit, but they are X only. mc is nice because it works in a console too. I was recently looking around for a linux editor that did utf-8 well. My testing showed that vim and gvim worked the best, so if you want to go thru the learning curve, vim and gvim( gtk2 gui ) is probably the way to go. If you want something that is easy to use, right from the start, try mcedit (the internal editor of mc). I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh	[reply]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by swampyankee (Parson) on May 06, 2006 at 17:41 UTC
Since editor choice is highly subjective, it's tough to give any meaningful recommendation. I prefer emacs (either xemacs or gemacs), but not enough to be a zealot. emc "Being forced to write comments actually improves code, because it is easier to fix a crock than to explain it. " —G. Steele	[reply]
Re: Any good Perl Editors for Linux? by phaylon (Curate) on May 10, 2006 at 10:26 UTC
Personally I can recommend Epic and Eclipse for larger code bases, and Scite and vim for code bases of all sizes. I've been on Scite for a few months because I wanted something with tabs. Now that vim7 is out, I'm back home there. Ordinary morality is for ordinary people. -- Aleister Crowley	[reply]