OK so I am guessing an editor war would not be welcome here ;-) I would recomend looking at vim tho if you were new to the editing world. It has a very very snazzy perl interpretor built into it, it allows you to run perl over the current buffer (amongst other things). I am an emacs head really, but the idea of running perl in an editor has long been one I think has wings. Shame I am too stuck into lisp atm ;-(
-- Zigster