> I was only looking for an editor which allows color-coded editing for > perl. > But I guess I can get more, like help with regular expressions etc. also > from these so called 'IDE's. > > Can someone please suggest the best free IDE for me to use with perl. Just > one internet search returned many choices and I do not want to experiment > with many IDEs.
Hi Rajeev, I think you have to resign yourself to *some* experimentation, simply because not everyone agrees on what the 'best' IDE (or editor) is...there's a question if you are only on Windows, only on Unix/Linux - or if you want to have portable skills. Bill suggests emacs or vi/vim/gvim - probably good choices in many respects, especially if you want to jump between a Windows and Unix/Linux system and use the 'same' editor. Personally I'd love to become proficient with Emacs, but so far I'm having a terrible time of getting rid of the finger dancing of Windows style cut-n-paste etc...:-(. Still - very capable and completely free. Another issue is whether you'll be ok with 'just' an editor or want a 'real' IDE (i.e. something that also encompasses debugger, build system and all the other things). It's not quite correct to compare somethink like Eclipse (definitively an IDE) with, say, emacs - though with a fair amount of extra work you can customize emacs to become exactly what you want. There are pros and cons to each. As a basic but working and capable *editor* I've been using Textpad for many years (www.textpad.com). It's nowhere near an IDE, nor as customizable like emacs, but does the job for all my regular text editing jobs, and has multiple color-coding settings coming with it, including Perl. You can use the eval for free, but it's cheap to avoid the small nags. For a full IDE, personally I would at this time look at Eclipse and the EPIC Perl plugin for it (http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/). As a longtime user of Eclipse for Java development I'm very comfy with the Eclipse environment and plugin mechanisms. Here you'll get integrated debugger support, color coding, code-completion and a bunch of stuff. Very capable, and completely free. Something I have never looked at is the Komodo thingie from ActiveState - may be that's your ticket? Should be capable, considering. Can probably be evaled free and should be cheap. Anyway, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of these choices, it's just a lot of user preferences and circumstances you need to consider. About the only thing you pretty much can't use is notepad unless you're a true masochist...:-). HTH, ken1 _______________________________________________ ActivePerl mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs
