vladb wrote: I would also appreciate it immensely if you could describe the system you use for work or at home. Which works best for you?

Red Hat Linux both at home and work. No real experience with wint or other UNIX to comment on usability, but as you mentioned, I too "...find navigating in *nix shell prompt much faster than clicking my way through never ending pile of clumsy windows".

Having said that, a great window manager is WindowMaker, and as many before me have pointed out Emacs is a great editor for Perl, but I find myself using pico more often than not.