Which editor(s) or IDE(s) are you using for Perl development? (Poll Closed)

The thing that attracted me to Vim is the same thing that attracted me to Perl - getting lots done with very few keystrokes. No carpal tunnel syndrome here!

The onlly problem with programming perl in VIM is poor perl support in cscope (not really vim problem).

I wrote a comparison of Komodo vs. Eclipse for Perl development.

vi for hacking, Kate for projects

Missing: various Emacs IDE packages like PerlySense, Sepia, and PDE.

@Roy I use vim for the same reason I use Perl, but a different reasonfron yours -I use it 'cause it's practically guaranteed to be available on everY system I use (admittedly I don't do much Windows work, which probably skews my view of the world oddly).

Notepad++ and Kate for editing local files (on Windows and Linux respectively); I like having a tabbed multi-file interface and selecting text with the mouse, and they're both lightning fast.

Komodo Edit for editing files on the server from my Windows box, which I do a lot. It's slower than Notepad++, but it can open remote files via SFTP, and also lets me group files files by task.

vim for hacking and spot-welding. I'm fairly proficient at vim, but I use Mason a lot (Perl embedded within HTML), and vim can sometimes lose track of whether it's looking at a section of HTML markup or Perl code. Also, the help files are in a kind of text-only hypertext format, and harder to navigate than HTML.

Although I use emacs, when I used vim, there was also perl-support, with lots of nifty things for vim.

So many options, and you don't have a checkbox for the single most popular editor on the Mac, BBEdit. Please add this checkbox, or otherwise you're relegating quite a large fraction of Perl developers into the "Other" box.

I use a combination of TextMate and vi to do Perl development. It all depends on the complexity of the work. From time to time, I'm tempted to explore IDEs, but in the end, a powerful text editor or a really simple one (vi) are what I need along with perl -c.

Interesting poll.

I'm probably not alone in this, but it's worth mentioning that I have a long of bundles hooked into TextMate, so while it's still short of a full IDE it's more than just an editor in my Perl workflow -- and of course it's a whole lot faster than anybody's IDE. :-)

About 3.75 years ago I had a Linux toolchain set up and I used Kate in a similar fashion.

ALSO, you might try asking your question on or near StackOverflow.com to catch some of the younger crowd, people who know Coda but not Vim, and so on.

cheers

-- frosty

Maybe of interest, survey in German Perl community Board

http://www.perl-community.de/bat/poard/thread/11594

Noted someone put up BBEdit for Mac, I'd also recommend their free TextWrangler be an option.

Use a couple, used most of them. All of them suck for one reason or another. Komodo is the closest to Perl-heaven, but it's slow, clunky, and out of date when it comes to Modern Perl. TextMate is the utopia of fast and flexible, but very poor Perl support beyond syntax highlighting.

Padre is a joke, a combination of slow, difficult to use, and could be great if a unified design came together, but that will never happen. :(

I use emacs cperl mode for more than 5 years

I develop on multiple systems, some of them headless. I use something that works equally well in a console and a window manager---on Windows, OS X, and free operating systems. Learning different editors for each situation would be a pain.

Using Emacs/CPerm mode for over 15 years.

BTW, it would be easier to find one's favourite editor when the entries were sorted.

No KEdit option?

Oops, I meant KWrite. You can take KEdit back off :)

Anyway, I see Kate listed; I thought Kate was the KDE component that the editor KWrite uses? But I am profoundly ignorant.

vi & vile, a vi clone. It's a general purpose editor which I use for programming any language, for writing mail, usenet posts, and about anything else. I've learned vi 25 years ago, and I haven't had the need to learn another editor since. On top of that, vi is available out of the box on almost any Unix system (Linux doesn't have vi - it usually has vim, but vim ain't vi). vi doesn't show my code in a myriad of colours, and that I consider a feature.

Voted for VIM.

Been using it for more than 6 years. Have all sorts of mappings for Perl snippets.

Check this screenshot http://rohan.almeida.in/vim_ide.jpg which displays multiple files open. ctags for Perl using Taglist displays list of functions. Mouse mode enables me to resize the split windows. F4 for complie, F5 for execute, etc. Love it!

It seems that the holy vi/emacs war is far from being over.

Actually my experience with listening to the younger techs is that the vi vs. emacs war is pretty much over by now, as you can see clearly by the tiny emacs bar in the poll.

Like Abigail hints at it is more of a vim/vi war nowadays.

I voted vim only because there was no separate vi option. And because the vim compat mode is ok if you really have to use some flavour without the real deal.

But really; colours in an editor? You guys read books with coloured text as well? I stopped doing that when turning 7 or so.

Yay, vi/emacs war reloaded!

Jimmy: vi/emacs are and will continue to be two completely different approaches to achieving an appearingly similar task... But the difference is far beyond using an editor. Emacs leans more towards the IDE side, vim leans towards the simple/fast minimalist tool side.

Of course, I picked vi and emacs as my choices - I usually run vi on smaller environments, or in servers which I don't fully control, or in my embedded machines where space is really at a premium (as it used to be in desktops over 20 years ago — I manage several machines with less than 32MB storage. Try to fit Emacs _and_ an operating system in there!)

However, there is a third side to this debate: Full IDEs. I think most Free Software developers will tend to laugh at people who need the power of a full IDE to do their work — Even though, yes, there are fully Free IDEs and I am not denying their value. It is just a different worldview. Honest, I have tried Eclipse and (early versions of) Padre... But I find it mostly useless for my usage patterns.

So... This traditional war we have should have a third side officially acknowledged :)

Really odd that you conflate vi (an incredibly minimal editor) and vim (virtually an IDE, scriptable in vimscript/perl/python/ruby, 100s of extensions/plugins) together - their users are poles apart in terms of the level of features they demand. Given you list a bunch of nobody-has-heard-of-this weird GUI editors, you could at least break down the traditional UNIX editors better.

Also I think you ought to track those who claim that "UNIX is my IDE". If you're doing this research for the good of others it would be handy, and even if just so you know how to prioritise feature development on Padre.

IMHO people get early separated by key- and mousebindings into warring tribes ...

But what are the benefits of using (g)vim with plugins if there is emacs with viper-mode?

And does vi(m) really start up faster than "emacs -nw -Q"?

IMHO with more orthogonal keybindings and an more intuitive scripting language than elisp emacs would quickly dominate the field.

I voted vim because that is what I am using -- more or less by chance and because it is _one_ decent choice. Obviously there is no lack in good or even great editors/IDEs. What I feel very much missing is some kind of hand-holding:
"Look I found this great tool, here is how I use it to its full power". And then lots of examples on SVN interaction, debugging, refactoring, packaging, documentation, project management, whatever.
There is some such material on Eclipse for JAVA developers but very little beyond the basic tutorials on Perl with any of the IDEs (or at least I didn't find any).

I use Multi-Edit on Windows systems and BBSEdit on the Mac...

I use vim because it's installed on all 30ish servers that I have to maintain. I sync my .vimrc to all servers, so I'm always using a familiar editor wherever I go. EPIC intrigues me though.

Emacs isn't just an operating system, it's a way of life. I understand many vi users have the same reasons. For both sets of users, it's easier to keep familiarity with the tool (even with some of its shortcomings) and free up creative energy for non-tool issues, like solving the end user's problem. There is a *real* energetic cost to learning and using unfamiliar tools, even if the feature set is larger.

UEdit, for builtin s/ftp, syntax support, code folding, and whitespace display.

The fact that Padre is just about impossible to install into RHEL tells you everything.

Most of us perl programmers do it as part of our JOB.

What Linux is used MOST on the job? RHEL.

Oh well, Eclipse+Epic is what we use and it works great.

I am using VIM because i dont know much about other editors :-)

vim on my netbook (crunchbang linux)
Mainly Padre on Windows (could not yet install it on the netbook), was Notepad++ before

I'm in the XEmacs/Emacs/Aquamacs + vi(m) camp, and I don't really feel oppressed because the different versions aren't listed.

I use VI or clones thereof to perform quick-and-dirty editing on a level above Perl one-liners (200-400 char one-liners? Whoops.), but usually I rely on the Emacs clones - preferably with a customized cperl-mode - for editing sessions I leave up and running through days or weeks.

I can see the attraction of an IDE similar to Eclipse for larger projects, having used it for a couple of Java projects some years ago. The principles behind Padre also seem quite sound, so I might give it a try RSN.

I do use vim and gvim ! Nothing else ... What for ? ;P

One reason I continue using vim is because it defaults to command mode and not to insert mode. It may sound counter-intuitive but when I'm coding I do more editing than straight typing. This means that I spend more time navigating through the document than I do writing long streams of text. Command mode lets me quickly navigate all over the code without having to leave the home keys.

If I ssh into a box three hops away, an IDE is going to be useless. I use vim (or vi if that's not available) for viewing and editing files. Locally, I'll use gvim because syntax highlighting rocks.

I try emacs once a decade, but I'm not sure if my company will pay LTD if my head explodes. ;)

@Alex Beamish: emacs can edit files over ssh just fine. :)

Anyway, I just GNU emacs with cperl-mode, flymake and a bunch other stuff (including Sepia, sometimes). cperl-mode is not perfect certainly good enough if you get a recent version, flymake does real as-you-type compile/syntax checking, do write/test/fix loops via compile-mode, connect a running perl process using Sepia and send/test code & do code-completion using that. Plus it's completely configurable and supports all the other languages I use.

@Alex Beamish - Try tramp with emacs, makes editing remote files over ssh the same as opening a local file.

I use emacs-nox with the startup screen off, boots fairly quickly. cperl-mode for syntax highlighting and indenting, tramp for ssh.

I have tried Padre and I like it, I need to test it out some more before I commit.

ditto abagail: vim seriously breaks vi muscle memory; vile does not.

This poll is (and was) easily manipulated. Just look at the HTTP headers.

vote for vim. But I found a interesting situation:
most of people voted for emac almost worked with perl more than 10 years.

Komodo

Uses jEdit for heavier development on my local linux laptop, and vim for local quick hacks and for remote editing as well... the latter almost constantly being a matter of quick hacks as well. If the remote editing turn into more serious editing, I setup a sync solution and get a local copy on my laptop which gets taken care of using jEdit.

And regarding syntax highlighting: having narrative text using different colors would be pretty annoying (except perhaps in chat transcripts where every different person's chat lines have a unique color for that specific person) but for formalized text describing program logic, mathematical expressions and the like, syntax highlighting allows my spine to start participating in my coding ;-).

BTW, should have voted jEdit, but the poll were closed...

I keep hoping that I could use Netbeans since I use it for everything else.
Maybe someday perl will be supported?

I have found Qwined 2008 editor to be very useful on Windows because it is free, has a good simple interface, is very customizable, good syntax highlighting, easy access to a DOS prompt in the same dir as the source file, navigation to source lines from errors in compilation window. It does not have a macro facility. I have had a couple of queries answered by the developers.
I look forward to continuing developments in Padre because that is showing great promise.

Vim! Vim! Vim! I'm using Macvim (Vim variant for Mac): http://code.google.com/p/macvim/

Count me in among the emacs addicts (not to mention the usenet group alt.religion.emacs , do I hear anyone typing [M-x gnus] ? ;). The built-in cperl and compile modes under standard FSF emacs (generally on WinXP and occasionally on redhat) have generally done the trick for me.