Well even though I'll be downvoted again by the vi advocates, I use the built-in editor of MidnightCommander, called mcedit. It has great coloration for Perl, has very intuitive keys,macros, and has a visible file manager for you to immediately test your script, just hit enter on the script, observer the output, then hit F4 to edit. I usually have 3 or 4 mc xterms opened at a time. It has menus for search and replace, can do "column edits", and I think is the easiest and fastest way to do Perl. It also has a built-in hex editor.

I don't dispute that vi is a better editor from technical viewpoints, but I find that anyone can sit down and start working with mc, (and without cheatsheets so common to vi).