Thanks for the links. There is Interesting stuff there, if not exactly usable in my environment right now. But it's interesting for motivation and instruction.

Another customization I've made is this:

o pager="cat > ~/tmp/DBGout"

with a pre-prompt action set to:

{ |y

This constantly updates the file DBGout with a dump of the currently scoped local variables.

BBEdit watches all files for changes and reloads them automatically when needed (while keeping the scrolled position in the file), so I have that file open in another window which now keeps the current variable values updated in real time while the cursor runs with the trace in the Perl source window, both with Perl syntax colouring as needed.

That's already pretty useful and quite a bit more convenient for me than the command line alone, because my code is pretty large and complex and even just the local data can be extensive as well. That makes it difficult to keep track of in the Perl debugger on its own.

It's a bit sad that I cannot create more than one watch file that way, but I guess I'll have to patch pager parameters into the debugger for that, too, so I can have separate windows for locals, globals, stack trace and so on by pushing them to separate files on every step (it's interactive anyway, so performance is not a big issue yet).