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abruskoFlag for United States of America

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Best Free Perl Editor for Windows?

Can anyone give me any input into the best (or some good) Free Perl Editors for the WinXP environment?

These are quite a few around and it will take me forever to demo them all, plus I am not sure which "features" are important.

Thanks!
Andy
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mkatmonkey
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I found EPIC in eclipse to be the best. My favorite features include syntax highlighting, dynamic error checking, and limited auto-complete.

Most editors with PERL get as far as highlighting syntax. This is one of the most important features as it makes reading your program so much easier.  Editors like VI and EMACS have this built in. They even have some limited error checking: making sure your quotes are closed and checking where your brackets are.

Epic in eclipse goes beyond this and attempts to be an IDE for Perl. Eclipse actually highlights all the potential problems in your code before you run it. Most of the time it is correct! This is one of the best features that other editors lack.

Epic also contains a few other features that are just sugar. For example, the auto complete is nice, but the drop-down menu doesn't always contain the variable that I want to use. It also includes code folding. If you have large subroutines that you want to temporarily hide, this would be useful.

Using Epic and Ecliipse has a few drawbacks. Though both are free, setting them up could be easier. It takes some time to learn to use Eclipse as well. So if you plan on developing huge amounts of Perl code, the time investment in Eclipse/Epic is definitely worth it.
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Thanks for the info mkatmonkey.  I was at the Eclipse site and there seem to be several "flavors":
  Eclipse IDE for Java Developers
  Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers
  Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers
  Eclipse for RCP/Plug-in Developers
  Eclipse Classic - Windows

Which would I use?

Also I am not finding anything on EPIC within Eclipse...can you give me any more info on that?

Appreciate it!

Andy
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mkatmonkey
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Thanks!  I did use Eclipse for a Java class once...thanks for the info!

Eclipse has been a pain for me because I am typically running on my laptop vmware + svn + trying to run eclipse - I seem to run into memory issues - when I do I like to close eclipse and use sciTE www.scintilla.org.

Perl Express Editor ( free as in beer)
http://www.perl-express.com/

Open Perl Editor
http://open-perl-ide.sourceforge.net/
Mozilla Public Licence 1.1

I on occasion like to use debugging in the IDE those above two solutions as well as EPIC have this feature.
To learn more about that look at:
How to debug Perl apps with Eclipse
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/os-dw-os-epic-i.html

I also find the svn plugin to eclipse useful or tortoisesvn and do ti straight from windows.

Mark