For folks new to the command line, I usually recommend nano or pico as being easy to learn, with a menu of options visible at the bottom of the screen. But I made the switch to vim a few years ago and have never looked back. It will give you perl (and php and sql and probably others) aware syntax highlighting with a simple well documented configuration. There are fantastic tutorials that will have you up and doing useful work in less than an hour. And its colon (:) prompt is a great place to hone your regex skills (although its a slightly different flavor than the perl regex).

Before I settled on vim, I was looking for a gui based IDE and watched Quanta for a while, hoping they might do for perl what they offered back then for php. Its a pretty full featured package with tie ins to cvs, diff, etc. But I have't used it and would trust others here who described it as buggy.

I just installed scite and its looks like a really nice package. I think I may try it out.

You can get everything you mention above at a command line (dcd or workbone for playing cd's), syntax highlighting (vim, my favorite, or emacs), spellcheck (with ispell). Vim is well worth the learning curve and as explained elsewhere in response to your question, is a great fail safe b/c it is installed everywhere. (Or at least vi is). But given where you are coming from, you may be more comfortable with scite or kate or even quanta.

-- Hugh