Single best thing I can say about Open Perl IDE is that the author responds quickly to bug reports. Other than that I'd have to say I'm still evaluating it. My current arrangement is a selection of editors and IDESs, I mainly use EditPlus, which has almost everything I want, syntax highlighting and so on, test by Alt-tabbing to Dos session. Also use CodeWright for heavy search and replace (typically with better regexs than EditPlus) It also has everything I want, but it certainly wasn't free or even cheap. I've got all of the ActiveState products which are getting better at a nice rate...but still too slow. I use emacs if I'm going to need portability between platforms for code editing or if it seems like I'll need a specialized editor. Mostly I'll use whatever comes to hand that does what I need it to do. Extra stuff always winds up proving that there is still no such thing as a free lunch. Lately I'm doing so much in multiple languages that I need an editor that speaks whatever I'm doing or that can be made to do so. I don't think this is a battle you can win, just one that you can keep up with—barely!

hsm