I, too, was once a devout GNUEmacs user. I have only been coding Perl professionally for the last 6 months, but w/ in the first two months, Emacs was quickly jetisoned for vim. I have also begun to use syntax highlighting, which I fear has made me lazy. I can only imagine what an IDE would do to my discipline. The features available from some of these products sound terribly convenient, but I would be cautious. One wouldn't want to lose one's edge over an IDE.