I was surprised at how much vi on linux supported perl development. Its regex's are not exactly the same, but come from the same sort of background. It was able to recognise perl language elements and give them a distinguishing colour - for example, you can quickly see if you didn't close quotes by the trail of pink that starts from the open quote and continues until wherever the next quote is found in the file!

Another plus-point was that it could also recognise SQL, ksh, C etc., so that the one editor, albeit rather old-fashioned for many people, does at least serve all devt. and admin. editing purposes.