First off, when I downloaded Komodo, it was in October, and still a developmental release. I don't know if that's changed. For those who are wondering idly, it currently runs under NT only, and Python must be installed. Komodo has a Mozilla based framework, so there's some things that don't quite make sense, that I hope will be taken out, or altered (e.g. the IRC client is still present. Maybe that could be hacked into a CB client; I dunno), and some things present Mozilla "we're accepting patches" alerts. While some of the visual elements bother me for stylistic reasons, they're functional, and for someone who cut teeth on Visual Studio, somewhat to quite familiar. Stepping into, over and through code is amazing :) perl -d seems a little flat this; it'll step through as far down as you like -- through your source and through all the modules you call.

I was also impressed with the variable watch window. It appears to understand all the basic datatypes, as well as hashes of things and arrays of things, and will present keys and values, if appropriate. I hope they define some kind of mouseover/tooltip behavior like VS does so that hovering over a variable will show a tooltip with its value. Komodo also has project files to group individual source files together, syntax highlighting which seems fairly intelligent for perl and Python, and grammar checking.

It is still in development, however... I managed to crash it a few times, and depending on the operation (DBI call, if I recall) the program became non-responsive & had to be killed off. The documentation was decent for a devel release. There were a few unfinished sections, but the had the meat of the important stuff in there. I'm eager to see how Komodo progresses. I'd especially like to see an win9x release so I can use it at home.