FAQ 3.10 Is there an IDE or Windows Perl Editor?

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3.10: Is there an IDE or Windows Perl Editor?

Perl programs are just plain text, so any editor will do.

If you're on Unix, you already have an IDE--Unix itself. The UNIX
philosophy is the philosophy of several small tools that each do one
thing and do it well. It's like a carpenter's toolbox.

If you want an IDE, check the following (in alphabetical order, not
order of preference):

Eclipse
http://e-p-i-c.sf.net/

The Eclipse Perl Integration Project integrates Perl
editing/debugging with Eclipse.

Enginsite
http://www.enginsite.com/

Perl Editor by EngInSite is a complete integrated development
environment (IDE) for creating, testing, and debugging Perl scripts;
the tool runs on Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP or later.

Komodo
http://www.ActiveState.com/Products/Komodo/

ActiveState's cross-platform (as of October 2004, that's Windows,
Linux, and Solaris), multi-language IDE has Perl support, including
a regular expression debugger and remote debugging.

Open Perl IDE
http://open-perl-ide.sourceforge.net/

Open Perl IDE is an integrated development environment for writing
and debugging Perl scripts with ActiveState's ActivePerl
distribution under Windows 95/98/NT/2000.

OptiPerl
http://www.optiperl.com/

OptiPerl is a Windows IDE with simulated CGI environment, including
debugger and syntax highlighting editor.

PerlBuilder
http://www.solutionsoft.com/perl.htm

PerlBuidler is an integrated development environment for Windows
that supports Perl development.

visiPerl+
http://helpconsulting.net/visiperl/

From Help Consulting, for Windows.

Visual Perl
http://www.activestate.com/Products/Visual_Perl/

Visual Perl is a Visual Studio.NET plug-in from ActiveState.

Zeus
http://www.zeusedit.com/lookmain.html

Zeus for Window is another Win32 multi-language editor/IDE that
comes with support for Perl:

For editors: if you're on Unix you probably have vi or a vi clone
already, and possibly an emacs too, so you may not need to download
anything. In any emacs the cperl-mode (M-x cperl-mode) gives you perhaps
the best available Perl editing mode in any editor.

If you are using Windows, you can use any editor that lets you work with
plain text, such as NotePad or WordPad. Word processors, such as
Microsoft Word or WordPerfect, typically do not work since they insert
all sorts of behind-the-scenes information, although some allow you to
save files as "Text Only". You can also download text editors designed
specifically for programming, such as Textpad ( http://www.textpad.com/
) and UltraEdit ( http://www.ultraedit.com/ ), among others.

If you are using MacOS, the same concerns apply. MacPerl (for Classic
environments) comes with a simple editor. Popular external editors are
BBEdit ( http://www.bbedit.com/ ) or Alpha (
http://www.his.com/~jguyer/Alpha/Alpha8.html ). MacOS X users can use
Unix editors as well. Neil Bowers (the man behind Geekcruises) has a
list of Mac editors that can handle Perl (
http://www.neilbowers.org/macperleditors.html ).

GNU Emacs
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html

MicroEMACS
http://www.microemacs.de/

XEmacs
http://www.xemacs.org/Download/index.html

Jed http://space.mit.edu/~davis/jed/

or a vi clone such as

Elvis
ftp://ftp.cs.pdx.edu/pub/elvis/ http://www.fh-wedel.de/elvis/

Vile
http://dickey.his.com/vile/vile.html

Vim http://www.vim.org/

For vi lovers in general, Windows or elsewhere:

http://www.thomer.com/thomer/vi/vi.html

nvi ( http://www.bostic.com/vi/ , available from CPAN in src/misc/) is
yet another vi clone, unfortunately not available for Windows, but in
UNIX platforms you might be interested in trying it out, firstly because
strictly speaking it is not a vi clone, it is the real vi, or the new
incarnation of it, and secondly because you can embed Perl inside it to
use Perl as the scripting language. nvi is not alone in this, though: at
least also vim and vile offer an embedded Perl.

The following are Win32 multilanguage editor/IDESs that support Perl:

Codewright
http://www.borland.com/codewright/

MultiEdit
http://www.MultiEdit.com/

SlickEdit
http://www.slickedit.com/

There is also a toyedit Text widget based editor written in Perl that is
distributed with the Tk module on CPAN. The ptkdb (
http://world.std.com/~aep/ptkdb/ ) is a Perl/tk based debugger that acts
as a development environment of sorts. Perl Composer (
http://perlcomposer.sourceforge.net/ ) is an IDE for Perl/Tk GUI
creation.

In addition to an editor/IDE you might be interested in a more powerful
shell environment for Win32. Your options include

Bash
from the Cygwin package ( http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/ )

Ksh from the MKS Toolkit ( http://www.mks.com/ ), or the Bourne shell of
the U/WIN environment ( http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/ )

Tcsh
ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/tcsh/ , see also
http://www.primate.wisc.edu/software/csh-tcsh-book/

Zsh http://www.zsh.org/

MKS and U/WIN are commercial (U/WIN is free for educational and research
purposes), Cygwin is covered by the GNU Public License (but that
shouldn't matter for Perl use). The Cygwin, MKS, and U/WIN all contain
(in addition to the shells) a comprehensive set of standard UNIX toolkit
utilities.

If you're transferring text files between Unix and Windows using FTP be
sure to transfer them in ASCII mode so the ends of lines are
appropriately converted.

On Mac OS the MacPerl Application comes with a simple 32k text editor
that behaves like a rudimentary IDE. In contrast to the MacPerl
Application the MPW Perl tool can make use of the MPW Shell itself as an
editor (with no 32k limit).

Affrus
is a full Perl development environment with full debugger support (
http://www.latenightsw.com ).

Alpha
is an editor, written and extensible in Tcl, that nonetheless has
built in support for several popular markup and programming
languages including Perl and HTML (
http://www.his.com/~jguyer/Alpha/Alpha8.html ).

BBEdit and BBEdit Lite
are text editors for Mac OS that have a Perl sensitivity mode (
http://web.barebones.com/ ).

Pepper and Pe are programming language sensitive text editors for Mac OS
X and BeOS respectively ( http://www.hekkelman.com/ ).



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