I also use BBEdit for all of my Perl coding on my laptop, and I like it a great deal. It's definitely has an impressive set of customizations and options. One thing of note (to new users):, you will have to set your newline character to 'UNIX newline' before you write your code. Using the default newline char in BBEdit left my code full of ^M's when I checked it out in emacs. Overall though, the fact that you can choose which newline character (DOS/Windows, UNIX, or Macintosh) BBEdit defaults to is really neat and useful.