I use vile (a vi look-a-like), with the following Perl specific settings:

define-submode perl shiftwidth 4
 1 store-macro
   goto-beginning-of-file
   append-string "#!/usr/bin/perl\n\n"
   append-string "use strict;\n";
   append-string "use warnings;\n";
   set-mode "perlmode"
   position-window b
   open-line-below-and-append-chars
~endm


 2 store-macro
   save-file
   shell-command &cat "perl " $cfilname
~endm


 3 store-macro   
   save-file
   shell-command &cat "perl -c " $cfilname
~endm

 4 store-macro
   save-file
   shell-command "make"
~endm


bind-key execute-macro-1 ^A-p
bind-key execute-macro-2 ^A-r
bind-key execute-macro-3 ^A-c
bind-key execute-macro-4 ^A-m
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Do I need more for development? Well, a second xterm is useful, and make. I love make. The only times I've replaced Perl programs that I wrote myself, with something else I've replaced them with Makefiles. Lots of fluids are important too. I always have one or more bottles of carbonated water on my desk, and coke (or other sodas) and/or tea is usually near as well.

For debugging, I mostly use plain print statements, sometimes I use YAML to show the structure of a complex datastructure (I find Data::Dumpers output to be unreadable). Command line options I may use for debugging are: -c, -Dr and -MO=Deparse. I've never used the Perl debugger. Sometimes I use [ps]?trace/truss (or whatever it's called on the box I'm working on) or snoop/tcpdump for debugging. Or I peek in the source. And then there are top, ps, *stat, glance, /proc/*, netstat, route and syslog which I use to debug and investigate problems with. Obviously, some of the tools are more Perl specific than others.

Abigail