Re: Perl IDE

[jdtoronto]

My money is on Komodo, I use it all the time. Especially as it has debugging access built in and CVS access built in - it makes for a one stop shop for Perl programming.

I had used Eclipse with the EPIC plug-in previously. But on a big project with big files it got to be atrociously slow. I have used Eclipse again recently on a clients installation of the IBM Websphere environment and whilst the later versions are somewhat better it sure doesn't warrant a change back.

Komodo isn't free, but for the price with the Perl Developers Kit, it represents very good value.

jdtoronto

[GrandFather]

I agree. In fact I have two copies of Komodo - a pro version at work and a "home" version at home. Even more important is that it has subversion support built in too (Update bah, pro version only). ;)

When I was looking around for a Perl IDE a year and a half ago I completely wasted about three days trying to get Eclipse installed with EPIC and be able to use the debugger in any sensible fashion. I couldn't find a way to do it. Others (g0n perhaps? Update Getting started with Eclipse & EPIC and Re: Perl Editor - Eclipse EPIC - How to debug?) have posted a good 'how to' recently and the problems seem to have been resolved - much too late for me though.

The Komodo editor has a lot of great features. It stands very well beside the Visual Studio IDE, and that is high praise. Indeed Komodo has features that I really miss when I turn back to the VS IDE such as being able to toggle the presence of various docked windows and its template/snippit management.

On the other hand, it does have a few bugs. The editor seems pretty stable, but the debugger looses the plot sometimes. I suspect that the debugger API is a little hairy with the result that Komodo can't regain control of the debugger at times leaving a hung process. Most often killing the Perl process allows Komodo to recover. Occasionally the Komodo process needs to be killed off too. Fortunately Komodo loads reasonably quickly and, if you use the auto save before run option, none of your edits are lost.

Komodo also has very good support HTML and XML editing along with support for a variety of other languages (Python, Ruby, PHP, ...) that may be installed on your system.

In case you didn't guess, I highly recommend Komodo.