With Kephra and Padre we have now to efforts to wrap up Perl developement tools in a graphical interface with Perl itself. They will be sharing (already stole some code from them) a lot of code and a common Plugin API (in Kephra called extension) isn't unlikely (both API in dev). But all the sad voices about pitty of duplication should recognize thats a good thing to have e.g. vi and emacs.

Kephra started as an attempt to write the perfect text based HTML editor. this way I learned that there is this thingy called Perl and that i should use it because it can handle text well. It is high level so i get my high flying plans done. over time i learned to love the perl community and wanted provide there IDE (made out of the CPAN tools) but the main notion never much changed (only matured): trying to develope some kind of perl 6 of text editing. This means: build the metatools that represent the natural principles in which people think and develope their software (or just write texts). Plus I believe in a GUI Interface, that can deliver more information/space which is more important the more complex the world gets. I think many inovation here waits to be made.

These metatools will begin to arrive up to the next major realease. this release was about the introduction of the needed abstraction layer, so that the app can change its icon set, user language, key binding, any menu or toolbar, event binding, and UI-commands on the fly. This is the bases that everybody can get the editor he wants to use. This is not mentioned in the changelog because its not a feature the user can see immediately.

This is also currently the biggest difference to Padre which started as a happy hacking project 2 month ago, by some very able person. It reminds me a bit what i read about the early days of Linux (might have a great future :) ). But on the contrary i was always concerned to provide something you can give a enduser (like version 0.4 :)) and was thatswhy not always the easiest guy to deal with. Nevertheless I invite everybody interested to hack on Kephra or an extension of it, like some enjoy today.

The transition from PCE to Kephra was not soft. After finding a name (which was the hardest :)) followed an internal cleanup, polish(fill the gaps, many many bug fixes), (make at least a CPAN-Distro) and write docs. The technical problems the CPAN-Module Kephra has today were (for some hacker uncomprehendible) were the last on my list but i hope to solve them up to 0.4.1 or 0.4.2.

P.S. Today I released 0.4 Patch Level 1 that fixes 3 issues that came up due the release.