Coming from a Unix background, I find the notion of an IDE silly. Unix is an integrated development environment. All of the editors, debuggers, compilers, interpreters, manuals, revision control and hundreds of other useful tools from 'at' to 'zgrep' are only ever a few keystrokes away. All that and the shell itself is a programming language too. You just can't get more integrated.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

Very nice. I'm not sure how that node slipped by me. It would be nice to include the ones from above that haven't been reviewed yet to your table.

Also, it would be nice to see the "joe" editor added since it is free, works very well and includes many, many features that pico lacks:

• replace
• Goto top of file, bottom of file, exact line number options
• open/resize multiple documents in the same window
• bookmark gotos
• has many WordStar compatible keystrokes (yes, I'm that old).
. . . etc. It is available as binary/source from Freeware for Solaris. Ackkkk ... it isn't listed for Solaris 2.8 anymore, hopefully it's just an oversight. The source is still available through the Solaris 2.7 links though. Better yet, the source is available via SourceForge.

I won't go into detail about Open Perl IDE, since it has been discussed pretty well.

--Jim

I have used/tried joe over the last two months. I need to add joe to the table.

The latest versions of pico do have two of the features you found missing:
replace is cleverly hidden inside of the "Where is" (Ctrl-w) command. To enable replace you have to start pico with at least the -b flag.
Line number is also cleverly hidden under the "Where is" commnad, once you enter that command the sub menu allows you to move to the exact line number via "Ctrl-t", you also get options for top of file, bottom etc.

I tend to use Xemacs or Vim under Linux, *nix, and Windows.
I need to stick to the same editors for my different platforms.

Dave

No emulation mode is ever going to get me away from the real vim - and since there's a native Win32 port of gvim, I'm as happy as a pig in.. well, you know. :-)

Makeshifts last the longest.

Well, the one feature vi doesn't have (or I don't know about) if a builtin ftp client that will allow me to work on remote files via ftp. I really need/like that ability.

"Nothing is sure but death and taxes" I say combine the two and its death to all taxes!

I would leave editors out all together... There are just too many of them! For Windows, you have Notepad, EditPad, MetaPad to just name a few! For Linux, you've got emacs, vi, vim, jed, joe, etc, etc, ad nauseum!

My feeling is that several editors get over looked because they don't have a cool IDE in their title, while they perform many of the same functions. IDE is also a term that is up for debate, Komodo is billed as an IDE, but it doesn't provide access to any revision control systems, I don't consider that a full featured IDE, I still use it, but I have to rely on outside utilities to work with CVS.

Some editors are the only option in some cases. If a person knows which programs are available on different platforms it might allow them get a small change done without having to go back to their "normal" environment. I have dealt with this first hand. I had a project that stipulated I couldn't install any editors* on the system and because of that I had to use WordPad to write the application.

I have also watched people that couldn't fix a problem on site because they were too dependent on the editors features to know how to do it the "old fashion" way.

So I recommend that people become comfortable with command line and complete GUI IDEs on multiple platforms so they don't get stuck without an editor, advice I need to follow better since I still get bitten from time to time.

* This was a major corporation with a very well maintained network and I was working on a workstation and not a server at the time. I didn't have an option because I was inside of their secure facility, there wasn't anyway to do the testing on my own machine because I wasn't allowed to connect to their network with outside equipment. They have since modified the rules and brought in a dedicated Linux box to host the application (completely Perl based), on which I primarily use SciTE to edit. For ones own sanity I don't recommend prolonged coding in WordPad.

IndigoStar Software is working on an IDE for Perl called PerlEdit.

The page says "PerlEdit is free for personal non-commercial use. Commercial use require the purchase of a commercial license."

They are up to version 0.03 (Beta) for both Windows and Linux. And that page also says "Known limitations: There is no watch window. The parsing and display of variables is incomplete, it works fine for simple scalars. Variable values cannot be changed." I'm not fond of beta (except when it comes to games) so think that I will wait for it to get out of beta before I try it.