I learned Perl over Telnet and developed code like you do for many years. The
advantages of an IDE are too numerous to list. Komodo's Mozilla-based tabbed
interface is particularly awesome.
The syntax check feature detects errors as you type, underlining broken
code, with a popup error from perl upon mouseover. The snippet feature lets you
build a list of reusable code so you can double-click to use Data::Dumper; for
example. It has a REPL, can watch files in living color, and handles a huge
number of languages (among very many other wonderful things).
Komodo Edit and Komodo_IDE are both free now so check it out!
