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Re: Setting up a 'Perl Development Environment'
by Sifmole (Chaplain) on Aug 13, 2001 at 21:20 UTC
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If you like VI, then you should investigate VIM and GVIM. | [reply] |
Re: Setting up a 'Perl Development Environment'
by Starky (Chaplain) on Aug 13, 2001 at 23:19 UTC
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I use emacs and a commercially available editor called Epsilon. Vim is a fantastic editor as well.
I highly recommend vim over vi. vim features are a superset of those in vi, so if you know vim, you can use vi. However, the extra features kick much booty and will make your programming experience much more enjoyable. If you are going to use vim, you simply must buy Steve Oualline's Vi iMproved. It is one of the best technical books on my bookshelf, and I recommend it to anyone learning either vi or vim head and shoulders over any other available books.
If you're new to the editors, you may get frustrated that there's a much steeper learning curve than with, say, Windows Notepad (hee hee). They often seem cryptic to new users. However, with much power comes much responsibility, grasshopper. Don't get frustrated and eventually you'll be able to edit your code at a speed that would be blinding to those who use the typical IDE.
While I would also recommend learning the Perl debugger from the command-line, if you like a GUI debugging environment, there is ptkdb, which runs in the Perl/Tk environment.
Of course, there is also ActiveState's Komodo, which provides a full-featured IDE. I would recommend a working knowledge of emacs and/or vi/vim even if you decide the full IDE is your bag given that (i) you can get just about everything an IDE gives you in emacs with very few exceptions (ii) emacs and vi will be on virtually every *nix machine you ever touch (as a consultant who never knows what a client will have available, that's *very* important to me) and (iii) emacs and vi/vim will be around for many many years to come with their basic functionality unchanged, where who knows for commercial products and (iv) they're free (who woulda thunk it?). I've been *dying* to try Komodo myself, and have been hoping that they get around to supporting emacs or vi keybindings. Although their focus is on the Windows market, the keybindings would endear them considerably to the *nix market.
Finally, there's Visual SlickEdit, which supports both Windows and *nix ports. While it's a commercial product, I have friends who are top-notch coders who swear up and down it's the best editor ever. "Ever!" they would say. It even supports keybindings that emulate editors such as emacs and Epsilon.
You should also be able to upgrade Perl from within the CPAN module. That would be my recommendation, as Perl is smarter about upgrading itself (e.g., where to put things) than rpm. Just enter the CPAN shell with
perl -MCPAN -e shell
and type help.
Hope this helps :-)
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(ichimunki) Re: Setting up a 'Perl Development Environment'
by ichimunki (Priest) on Aug 13, 2001 at 21:26 UTC
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Best software for cranking out Perl scripts? emacs! or vi! it's all about learning to use the tool efficiently. I use emacs as I like its modelessness more than vi's modedness-- and emacs does more than just edit text. I use vi by accident once in a while. For plain old Perl I think the jury is still out. :)
For the newer version, if you can find an RPM that's the way to go since you will be less likely to have issues with the RPM database that way. But installing from CPAN source is mostly painless in my experience.
Since you have the Linux environment, take a good look at managing your programming projects with CVS (concurrent version system). This provides a backup (even if it's on the same drive) and a changes history. That way you can always get your last version of the script back if you need to, without having a drive full of script_v1.pl, script_v2.pl, script_v3.pl... And since you may become addicted to cheap Linux machines (I know I am-- after all, now you have a development machine, you'll need a DB server and an Apache server next, right *wink*), CVS makes creating central code repositories easier down the road. | [reply] |
Re: Setting up a 'Perl Development Environment'
by MrCromeDome (Deacon) on Aug 13, 2001 at 21:19 UTC
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Well. . . . ;) I've always liked vim on *NIX (primarily because I can't get my favorite editor for Windoze on it), but I imagine emacs, fte, and others would work equally well. Are you planning on using X? I prefer KDE, for which you can get some spiffy development tools (KDevelop and KDEStudio). I've never used the editors inside of them for perl, but they may work out for you.
I don't particularly care for the RPM format (compile from source ;) but RedHat's web site may have some updated RPMs for perl. I can't vouch for the RPM's by ActiveState. But (for me) in the past, RedHat has always been pretty decent about providing updated RPMs in a timely manner. Your mileage may vary.
Hope this helps,
MrCromeDome | [reply] |
Re: Setting up a 'Perl Development Environment'
by suaveant (Parson) on Aug 13, 2001 at 21:17 UTC
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Re: Setting up a 'Perl Development Environment'
by Bucket (Beadle) on Aug 13, 2001 at 21:24 UTC
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If you do decide to go with the ActiveState RPM binary, you can also look into Komodo. Syntax highlighting, debugging, the works. I prefer vim to it, but its not a bad IDE. Komodo requires Activestate perl, at least the last time I checked. It also works well on windows.
HTH
--
Bucket | [reply] |
Re: Setting up a 'Perl Development Environment'
by enoch (Chaplain) on Aug 13, 2001 at 21:36 UTC
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First of all, (and this is just the distro zealot in me pushing through) format your box and install debian. You will be happier down that road, trust me. When I first started, I installed Red Hat 5.0 and liked it. Then, I found FreeBSD; and my world was so much better. Recently, I have returned to the Linux kernel with my newfound love of Debian and 'apt-get install anything'. The one piece of advice I can give you is Debian.
As far as text editors for coding go (you've heard vi, VIM, and emacs), I am a pretty big fan of nedit.
Jeremy | [reply] |
Re: Setting up a 'Perl Development Environment'
by mugwumpjism (Hermit) on Aug 14, 2001 at 21:05 UTC
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The most ubiquitous editor with the most features and extensibility has to be emacs. Crank emacs up and run the tutorial.
However, it is handy to be very proficient at VI's editing mode, for speed of coding. M-x viper-mode (you will understand what that means after reading the emacs tutorial) will give you VI editing keys but will also do things like highlighting regions you are changing, which is useful.
Turn on syntax highlighting with M-x global-font-lock-mode and see how perl code looks.
Eventually you're going to need to replace the default perl-mode with one that works properly (Perl is a very hard language to parse, so the editing modes rarely get it right). Grab a recent copy of cperl-mode from CPAN, and set that up.
Don't listen to the fools that are trying to entice you to Debian. It's like smack, once you try it you can never stop using it, no matter how much it is ruining your life!
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