Perl is highly non-trivial to parse, which is why a any Perl IDE will have a lot of problems, even for jobs as seemingly simple as syntax highlighting.

Nah, I am using Crimson Editor (a Win app), in which scripts can be executed with a shortcut (create your own macros and make one macro to call perl) and that includes syntax libraries for Perl and other languages. It works nicely. It does not parse Perl, it does not need to, but it works nicely together with perl.exe.

What I don't understand is why a Perl editor should be written in Perl itself. You're ultimatly dealing with a stream of bytes, which is as a completly language-agnostic concept as you can find.

Well, in my opinion it should be possible with any good language to create an editor. So why not an editor, written in Perl. And why not a graphical editor. It is a proof of strength, of versatility. It is a goal in itself. Write code with something that is written in Perl code.

Furthermore, such an editor would be (in addition to the test suites) one of the first things to check when a new release of Perl would be published. If it stopped working, it might be a good sign something is wrong with the new release (yes yes, I know, of course, any editor contains bugs).

Lastly, a good editor included in the Perl distributions is a nice completion of the package. Install Perl and start working in Perl and with Perl. No extra's needed. And when we're at it, a nice module searching/finding/installation/updating feature in the editor would be much welcomed by at least me.