You have heard of Google right? Click the link. There are at least 4 options on the first page of listings, all either free or with free trials.

Editors and IDEs are a totally personal choice so other peoples opinions are of rather limited utility. I like vim and totally fail to understand why you would not love it too. Go on. Learn vi/vim in 50 lines and 15 minutes :-)

You can probably run Win32 Optiperl on Linux in/on/under any of Vmware, Wine or Win4Lin. See this overview.

Here is an incomplete IDE list:

• Arachno Perl from Scriptolutions (Windows and Linux; Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby)
• Eclipse multiplatform IDE has Perl plugins
• Komodo from ActiveState (Windows and Linux)
• Open Perl IDE (Windows)
• Optiperl Perl IDE (Windows)
• Perl Builder 2 from Solutionsoft (Windows and Linux)
• PerlEdit from IndigoStar (Windows and Linux)
• Perl Oasis from Johan Lindström (Windows)
• PerlWiz from Arctan Computer Ventures (Windows)
• SciTE from the SCIntilla project (Windows and X/gtk+)
• visiPerl+ from Help Consulting (Windows)

I like vim and totally fail to understand why you would not love it too.

And since you've mentioned it, I'll take this chance to once again advertise my article 'Vim for perl developers'. :)

Leonid Mamtchenkov aka TVSET

Go on. Learn vi/vim in 50 lines and 15 minutes

Or you can take 15m to learn X?Emacs (where "m" stands for months) and you will have an IDE for all seasons, just about all languages, all human tongues, total scriptability (Lisp underneath), macros, templates, command key assignment, split panes, that can also browse, play games, send email, and comes with more built-ins than one could ever hope to discover.

But seriously, it's personal. Some of the best hackers I know only use vim (flame attractant: Pico users on the other hand...). I've been an editor and writer for almost 20 years though and if I can't have Nisus, Quark, or the lost but not forgotten WriteNow, I'll keep Emacs.

Update: spelling fix.

I have been using Komodo for years, and absolutely love it. Syntax Highlighting, auto complete, and it even runs your code through the perl compiler and can show your syntax errors and any warnings your script would generate. The only major draw back to it that I can see is it's flimsy support for regular expressions (python syntax at that!).

I knew this subject is an old religious war among coders, and knew asking about an IDE on PM would bring back the customary answers, but decided to ask anyway......

And now after some reflection I am considering going back to emacs after all these years........

And so I headed over to Amazon to find a good book on Emacs for my reintroduction........

And, I am not making this up, a search for 'emacs' on AMZN turned up, off all things, the Holy Bible (!)

All 779 results for emacs :     Sort by:    Featured ItemsBestsellingA
+vg. Customer ReviewPrice: Low to HighPrice: High to LowPublication Da
+teAlphabetical: A to ZAlphabetical: Z to A      
1.   Holy Bible: English Standard Version 
by Not Applicable (Hardcover ) 
Avg. Customer Rating:  
(Rate this item) 
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 • Excerpt from page 1039 "... on the cheek, "Matthew, and Thomas, and
+ James the 17'[ eMac',Mat offer the other also, and from one who and 
+Simon ..."
See more references to emacs in this book.
[download]

And alt.religion.emacs remains a good newsgroup to learn about emacs... but only if you're willing to embrace the faith.

As far as books about emacs, the two I would suggest are:

• GNU Emacs Manual by Richard M. Stallman
• An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp by Robert J. Chassell
Both of these are available through the earthly conduit of the holy fire, gnu.org. Also, as is their wont, the full texts of these books ship with emacs, along with the full Gnu Emacs Lisp Reference Manual itself: Try ESC x help i and look down the list.

The O'Reilly book Learning GNU Emacs, Second Edition might be okay, if you could find a copy (it's been out of print for ten years). Their "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions" by Bob Glickstein was also pretty good, but I think it's been out of print even longer. (It could be that O'Reilly has essentially moved on from being the uber-geek's book company... maybe it's time for Apress to do some emacs books?)

Don't forget to check the emacs wiki page: PerlLanguage.

Thou powers known to but a few, thou public API widely advertised.

Since you mentioned: code folding, the built-in regexp tester and perl-tidy, the syntax colorization, the easy click into modules, the real-time syntax and warnings checks. You might look into jEdit (www.jEdit.org).

It is the only single IDE I have found so far that includes everything you specified, as well as run on both platforms. It is open source. If there is another one out there I'd enjoy to hear about it.

Thanks!

I dont know of such features, but you can check for perl syntax and pod on an event such as after saving (after-save-hook). I have just added such a elisp function here:
http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=398159

> does anyone know here if there's a mode that does syntax 
> checking (eg 'strict' and 'warnings' in real time)?

Yes. It exists and is called flymake.

http://flymake.sourceforge.net/

yes: flymake-mode (In the docs there is an example for perl checking if it isn't set up already)