On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Andrew Moore <<a href="mailto:amoore@mooresystems.com">amoore@mooresystems.com</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d">On Wed, May 07, 2008 at 02:35:04PM -0500, Sterling Hanenkamp wrote:<br>
> I guess I don't understand what's limited about either vim or emacs. Both<br>
<br>
</div>They don't understand perl, so it is limited in its ability to help me<br>
write it better. It can't make completion suggestions based on my<br>
current context. It can't help me refactor my code very well. It can't<br>
do a lot of things that an active editor for other languages can do.<br>
<br>
For instance, if I have a CGI object, which is an object with a<br>
"param" method, I should be able to type:<br>
<br>
$cgi->par</blockquote><div><br>This is what ctags are for in vim and I believe emacs as well. Here's a perl module for helping out in Vim:<br><br><a href="http://search.cpan.org/dist/Perl-Tags/">http://search.cpan.org/dist/Perl-Tags/</a><br>
<br>Also for Vim there's the Perl-support module which does a number of things. I don't use it since I didn't like it when I last tried it a year or two ago, but here's another helpful Perl plugin for vim:<br>
<br><a href="http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=556">http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=556</a><br><br>These features do exist in vim and I'm pretty certain similar ones exist in emacs. You do have to go through the additional effort of installing and configuring the modules.<br>
<br>I should also point out that I don't use ctags or this kind of autocompletion on purpose because I find it encourages me to be too lazy and I start forgetting things. (I'm not suggesting that's the case for everyone, but it is my problem. I also have a tendency to write code that is generated on the fly, which makes such completion even more difficult.) I am not sure how well these things parse and work, but from past experience, I do know they work somewhat. I believe Komodo and EPIC for Eclipse also provide autocompletion for Perl where it can.</div>
</div><br>So, such things do exist, but they may not work as well as one would want (seriously, what does?). If you have an idea for improving them, go hack! :)<br><br>Cheers,<br>Sterling<br>