Hi,
I am new to perl and Linux. I work on a Red Hat 9.2 Machine. When I started I used to work with "gedit". But when gedit crashed and refused to come up, I discovered "kate". Now the thing about kate(K Advanced Text Editor), is that

1. It does automatic colour highlighting of text.
2. It indicates the corresponding parenthesis if you reach any one of the pair.
3. There are even shortcuts to comment and uncomment multiple lines.
4. There is also a file browser and shell prompt. So that you can execute your programs from within the application.

There maybe other qualities as well, but I am satisfied with the ones above.