Cross referencing just seems so '80s to me.

Now I totally disagree. If you have several ten thousand lines of Perl code in a project. And a well written project I might add (at least as well as real-world circumstances allow). And you want to orient yourself and/or clean up....

To put it simple: Get more insight to the code

You will need cross reference.Period.

It is extremely hard to find anything usable for Perl that actually works. And I must - sorry - scoff on the old argument that Perl code can be generated at runtime and therefore all trials for Xreferencing perl are futile. Yes. So what? If I can solve/cover 95% of all perl code there is!?

I'm currently seeing two/three alternatives that could prove usable for Perl X-referencing:

• Hypersrc - a generic source code browser utilizing the exuberant ctags tagging system which has - among many others - support for Perl.
• The Imenu Tagging system in Emacs
• The ECB for Emacs

Hypersrc almost works, somehow it doesn't render functions/methods right and doesn't provide the "is called by" backreference information for methods. But exuberant ctags does a fairly good job, so browsing tagged entities is good.

Imenu tagging in Emacs works, but gives you only a hierarchy-popup that allows you fast browsing from a set of files down to the method/function level.

ECB is supposed to be able to utilize the Imenu tagging information and should then work well. Well...

I hope I will be able to find a *working* X-referencing system for Perl anytime soon, as you simply need it from a certain complexity and volume of your project.