Just want to say thank you for the tip about "-wb" for pico. I use pico quite a lot to do small stuff via ssh on our Solaris machines... can't believe I never took the time to find that out. Doh. Thanks again!

Note to self: add alias on monday.

---

You have moved into a dark place.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

Hey, you misspelled vim 6 times ;)

Prepare the holy hand grenade! Emacs and cperl-mode.

Honestly, you should search for "text editor" or "perl editor" in the search box- we've gone over this a bajillion times, like here and here.

-Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from doubletalk.

There are several editors geared more towards programming available, I guess - for one thing you have Komodo available from ActiveState. When I tried it though, it was slow as syrup - but that was a while ago. It is probably worth a new try, if you want something specialized for perl.

In all reality, I think that the final choice of editor matters little - they all have their advantages. What you want to do is to pick one you are comfortable with and learn it really well instead. That will gain you much more in both short and long term, than trying to find the perfect editor.

I also think that you should not find an editor that is specially geared towards perl, but rather find one that is good with a lot of things. TextPad still fits that bill, as do a lot others. Unless you are sure you will do only perl, and nothing else, for ever and eons, of course. :) I'd like to think that I am, and will be a bit broader than that...

Nothing wrong with mastering several tools, and using the best tool for each job, but if you can fit most jobs into a multipurpose tool, your toolbox is lots easier to transport and carry with you. As long as you can get by with any other tool when needs be, of course.

There is a review of Komodo here at the Monastery. There have been improvements in it, but the a new stable release has not been made.

Choice of editors seems to be a very personal matter, so this is just my little point of view.

Under Unix I use Vi, it loads quickly which makes it ideal for small changes, and seems to be available on virtually every machine and able to run during quite severe problems. Whilst I don't do sysadmin professionally anymore (Yay! No more 2am call-outs) I did find it very useful then.

Now at work I develop on a Win2k desktop connected to Solaris servers, and I use Ultraedit. It's got a fairly nice collection of editing tools, syntax highlighting (Including Perl) which you can create your own syntaxs for, Save/Load to FTP which saves me an awful lot of time, and as been said before it can be configured to run scripts and leave the results handy. Do find it useful to be able to add to the syntax highlighting, allowing me to do things like write my own highlighter for Macromedia Director's own language Lingo.

It's entirely possible other editors provide all this, but I thought I'd just let you know my own views on this powderkeg matter.

* blowing my own horn *

If you use UltraEdit, take a look at Perl Oasis and see if you like it. I know I do(1) :)

/J

(1) Actually, it's more like a habit. I miss it when it's not there...

jedit would be the perfect editor if they switched to using SXW (the new GUI stuff from IBM that's platform specific - i.e Windows on Win32, and Gtk on Unix). Until then I just find it way too slow :-(

Hi, thanks so much for mentioning Jedit, I love it as well, never heard of it before. Ty

For beginners, I'd recommend mcedit. It's shipped with GNU Midnight Commander, and has excellent Perl syntax highlighting and very intuitive controls.

For more advanced users and demanding beginners, I'd say vim is an excellent choice, because of its reasonable Perl syntax highlighting (let perl_want_scope_in_variables=1, let perl_extended_vars=1, let perl_include_pod=1, syntax on), automatic indenting (set smartindent, set autoindent) and many useful features.

My .vimrc (for vim 6.1) is as follows:

set smartindent
set tabstop=8
set shiftwidth=4
set softtabstop=4
let perl_want_scope_in_variables=1
let perl_extended_vars=1
let perl_include_pod=1
colorscheme elflord
syntax on
[download]

- Yes, I reinvent wheels.
- Spam: Visit eurotraQ.

I use WinEdit which is not bad. I think it is geared more towards html but it does perl as well.

Best advice is just to use what you like. The "perfect" editor will get debated forever