Have you discovered Midnight Commander( 'mc') yet? It's default internal editor does a very nice job of color-syntax highlighting perl. Just hit F4 on the file. It's only drawback is it dosn't support utf-8 yet( it is promised in the next release), but it is very easy to use. You can switch to a black background too, I'll post my color scheme if you want to try it. If you are running it in an xterm, do a control-right-mouse-click on the xterm, you can select font size. I like huge.

Another couple of editors with nice Perl syntax highlighting, are cooledit and nedit, but they are X only. mc is nice because it works in a console too.

I was recently looking around for a linux editor that did utf-8 well. My testing showed that vim and gvim worked the best, so if you want to go thru the learning curve, vim and gvim( gtk2 gui ) is probably the way to go. If you want something that is easy to use, right from the start, try mcedit (the internal editor of mc).