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!