At the risk of starting a religious war, which really isn't my intention here, I would recommend trying out XEmacs (www.xemacs.org). It comes with cperl-mode as the default Perl mode by default, and has several other, IMO, improvements over GNU Emacs. Aside from that, cperl-mode is good, better than perl-mode in my experience, and according to cperl-mode.el is a part GNU Emacs, so you should already have it. Have you tried activating cperl-mode (M-x cperl-mode) in a buffer? -- Mishka