I prefer emacs. I like vim, but still find myself going back to emacs as I find it a little less cumbersome to customize. I guess it's whatever you learn first or are more comfortable with -- they both do the job.

CSUhockey3

I use Midnight Commander. It has nice syntax highlighting for perl, is easy to use, and is real handy for testing because after you edit your script, you can run the script just by hitting enter on it, and you can quickly see any output files, etc. No doubt, that vi(vim) is more powerful, but it is much more cryptic to learn.

In your situation, the mc built-in editor mcedit (F4 button), displays word count, current word, line count, and current line in it's status display. It has alot of shortcut keys, <Meta -l> will prompt for which line to go to. The Meta key is <escape> on most systems I've seen. So hit <escape l> then 300, to go to line 300.

MC 's built in curses file-directory manager is sweet to use. You can move files around quite easily, and do all sorts of file operations with it. It is quite nice to have one interface to learn to do almost everything you need, move files, launch apps, edit files, even hex editing. (Although it may be a bad habit, since you start depending on mc, and loose those command line skills ....I always have to read "man rename" everytime I need to use rename, because mc's <shift-F6> makes it so easy)

And as a bonus, you can tell mc to use vi, instead of it's internal editor if you want.

Try mc to hack,
you will never go back. :-)
[download]

I'm glad that in the past you've learned from your mistakes and now understand what <CODE> tags are. Hopefully you'll now also learn about the marvels of searching the archives at the Monastery, as most questions you can think of to ask have already been answered. . .

- - arden.

Hi.

You may like to try the E-P-I-C plugin for the Eclipse 3 platform. You can find it over at e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net. EPIC version 0.3.0 has just been released today, the first release designed for Eclipse 3, and it is very cool. In fact, I would say even this early release rivals some of the features of the commercial Perl IDEs I have seen (e.g. ActiveState Komodo).

You owe it to yourself to at least try it out. ;-) I've been keeping an eye on the EPIC project for a while, and I think the combination of the swish new look of Eclipse 3 and the cross-platform nature of Eclipse will make this a must have, especially if you develop in many other laguages as well as Perl.

Updated: I have now had a chance to play around with this a bit more, and the only feature which is still a bit lacking in some areas is the integrated debugger. There are still a few subtle bugs in this which may put a few people off. However there is rich support for external commands, and it shouldn't be hard to add support for another debugger (or even the command line Perl debugger) until the EPIC guys get around to fixing this. Otherwise, I have found this a very nice IDE.

$q=[split+qr,,,q,~swmi,.$,],+s.$.Em~w^,,.,s,.,$&&$$q[pos],eg,print

Another vote for Context here, since it works great as a straight text editor as well as a syntax highlighter.

For example, it lets me highlight a column of text and specify a character to fill the block with.

Fans of the old QEdit program (aka TSE / TSE jr) need look no further.

John

I used TextPad for a while, but its syntax highlighter often seemed to break down. Now I use vim, which I recommend. But it is a commitment.

qq