Learning emacs and Perl at the same time: surely a big endeavour! But with great rewards after a while. My best wishes. To answer a few points in your posting: - If your emacs kit is complete, you should already have perl mode and cperl mode. Your problem is to invoke it. See below. - The use of these modes is to get colors (comments in pink, double-quoted strings in purple, etc), to get a proper indentation each time you type a brace, or a semi-colon, and other nifty features. - .emacs is the personal configuration file, like .profile or .vimrc for other purposes. It should be in your home directory. - The lines you should add to this file: their use is to invoke *automatically* perl mode or cperl mode, each time you load ("visit" as they say in emacs doc) a perl script. But you do not really need it at first. Instead, you can type ESC x perl-mode RET or ESC x cperl-mode RET each time you "visit" a perl script. Later, when you are no longer a newbie, you will update your .emacs script, with the perl mode you like better (perl or cperl). - When you know enough emacs commands, including split window commands, you should try this: - "visit" a perl script - open "Programming Perl" (the Camel book) page 517 - type ESC x perldb - enjoy! I have tried the Perl debugger while in bash, and I have disliked it. I have tried it while under emacs, and it is great! - If you can read French, I can help you learn emacs, by sending you a list of useful commands. This is a 9K HTML file. Write me to Ponder.Stibbons@wanadoo.fr (person to person mail, no mailing list, no Perl monk web page)