Super Search is your friend ;). A text search using "Perl editor syntax highlight" in SoPW excluding replies turns up (among others):

• Seeking editor with syntax highlighting and unicode
• Cross-platform development: editors
• Which text editor
• Know of a perl editor with syntax highlighting?

If you decide to go with vim, I would like to make you aware of perl-support.vim, whose vim.sourceforge.net site appears to be down ATM, unfortunately. But I think you would find it useful. :-)

HTH,

I second grandfather'sOld_Grey_Bear's suggestion to try vim. While I am fond of emacs, "small" is one word I would not use to describe it.

You could also try nano, but I've never used it.

My $0.02 would also be to go with vim, and its "graphical" version gvim too.  It's an amazing tool, which has come a long, long way from its vi roots.

Ironically, I started out as a fan of emacs (the other great editor, originally written by Richard Stallman).  At my first computer job, and on my first Unix system (more than 20 years ago), I was enamored of emacs, and found it very useful to write macros for work.

But at my second company, emacs wasn't available.  The best choice by far was vi; it was the most flexible and most reliable available on the Data General computer at that time.

Ever since learning vi I've been hooked on it, and the transition to vim/gvim was very simple when it became available.

You should be aware that it may seem a little tricky to use at first.  You have to get used to being in "movement mode" versus "edit mode" (in emacs you're in "edit" mode all the time, even when moving around).  But once you've used it enough that your fingers have "memorized" it, it can really become natural and smooth to use.

I'll go along with this, too, with a similar story. I very briefly used emacs, but couldn't remember the (seemingly) 4 step key commands - control-w control-x, or whatever. I forget, obviously. Thankfully ;)

I did a long tour of plain vanilla vi (my early Linux/FreeBSD days, then a long contract as a Solaris admin), thinking I was Mr. Vi - woo, look at me! setting marks, yanking to named buffers, and my perl background helped a lot with doing 'complicated' find/replace regexen on the vi command line. Never got exposed to vim or its advanced features.

Until a few weeks ago. Boy, have I been missing out. Now I'm browsing the file explorer, stepping through my buffer history, opening vertical and horizontal splits. And I've setup my first kep mappings and macros, naturally containing perl-isms. Including the first one of which I was especially proud, adding a POD entry for the word under my cursor, a few lines above my current line (for ease in creating POD for subroutines).

I got my start down the advanced vim path partly by shoulder surfing an apparent vim wizard at the office, but also right here at the monastery with the help of this single solitary link: .vimrc for perl programmers. That node (and the many helpful replies therein) merely brush the surface. There are other tips (there's a cool tip for a key mapping that filters your source through perltidy contributed by cees), links to additional perlmonks discussions regarding vi/vim, links to offsite tutorials (one of which was written up by TVSET), and a lot of other really good reading material.

You're right, getting around in vi/vim can be a little tricky at first - I know it was a little tough to remember way back when. But these days, I get into the equivalent of notepad/textedit and inadvertantly leave little clues around the file that indeed, I am a vim user.

<ESC>:wq!


--chargrill

---

s**lil*;  $*=join'',sort split q**;  s;.*;grr; &&s+(.(.)).+$2$1+; $; =
qq-$_-;s,.*,ahc,;$,.=chop for split q,,,reverse;print for($,,$;,$*,$/)
[download]

If you don't mind laying out a whole £16.50/$30.00, then I can highly recommend this one. They allow you to download a full featured trial copy first so you can convince yourself it is worth the cost.

It's not perfect; and far from the most complex or feature rich editor, but it has pretty much everything I need and will take you no time at all to get comfortable with as most everything you do in notepad will work immediately. And everything else is available from menus, as well as being bound or bindable to keystrokes.

You'll also need to download syntax definitions for Perl and other languages, along with dictionaries for spell checking if you want them,

The entire thing installed, including help files, a dozen or so syntax definitions and dictionaries for 5 langauges comes in at under 5MB.

I also have long enjoyed the simple utility of TextPad.

Alternately, you can use ssh to connect to a remote server and use whatever editor you like. I recommend putty , which is only 412kb and doesn't need to install anything.

The prices on USB drives has fallen dramatically, so you could upgrade to a 1GB drives for $20. The 256mb drives will probably start showing up in cereal boxes in a few years. ;-)

Cheers,

JohnGG

I'll second the use of ConTEXT as I use it at work. It even handles the difference between Windoze/DOS text files and *nix files.

I personally like Notepad++. It's only 1.18MB, and it has some great syntax highlighting features.

I'd actually recommend TextWrangler for the specific application mentioned. (TextWrangler fills the role of the what was previously BBEdit Lite)

You lose the glossary/macros/clippings/whatever they want to call them this verson (you can work around this with text filters), and some of the HTML features, but it'll still do the job requested, at a much smaller size. (and, well, it's free, which is nice, too)

Disclaimer: I have been a beta tester for a few BBEdit releases, but I get no compensation other than comp'd software

Hi Spidy.

You might like GNU nano. It's syntax highlighting is pretty basic (a handful of regexes that color what they match -- last match wins), but works well enough most of the time.

You might not want to be too picky about how agressively your editor syntax-highlights Perl though. It's very tough to do it correctly. It's been often said that only perl can parse Perl, and syntax-highlighting it requires parsing it to some degree.

Lately, I picked up a 64Mb USB drive ... Does anyone know of an editor that I would be able to install and run off of a USB drive that does syntax highlighting?

Are there editors that require more than 64Mb of disk space? Even Emacs should be able to fit on a 64 Mb drive.