Personally I use jedit because the macros can be really useful. I've got one set up to search for all the subroutines in a file and show them in the search panel which is great if you're working with unfamiliar code. The only problem is that sometimes the syntax highlighting does fall down.
Where I do work directly through the console its always vim for me. If you haven't come across it already check out this node Vim for Perl developers for setup advice.