Please pardon this humble neophyte, but I am having trouble getting my head around how to set myself up efficiently. The general language documentation is excellent! I love the elegance of the language and I have managed to write several moderately complex scripts just using VIM.

I have been debugging by running perl at the command line, adding print statements for debugging, rerunning, removing the print statements, etc. This seems unnecessarily slow and tedious, so I'm hoping there might be a better way. (For example Python has Idle--when a program dies, it leaves the environment intact so that you can execute code interactively to get more information without having to edit the original code and reproduce the error.

  1. Is there an IDE with good code completion for Perl that runs on a modern linux? PADRE looks like the type of thing that would be ideal, but it seems to be abandonware (Ubuntu 10!? Circa 2012). Strawberry Perl also looks good... but I don't do Windows, and it appears to be for Windows only. The "perl debugger" looks very hard to use for a casual user.

    Since I don't code on a daily basis syntax completion would be a big help, but I don't have a budget for an expensive commercial product.
  2. How to install packages so that I don't make a mess of my system. (I develop on Linux Mint.)
  3. Is there a way to deploy scripts so that they are stand alone (say a single source file, or a single directory? I want to deploy a script or two to my pfSense box without disrupting the system or installing a lot of bloat or something that might impact the integrity of the system.

My searches have lead me to many broken links or very old pages. Any guidance would be much appreciated.

In reply to Workflow / Setup Questions by monsignor

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