[Chicago-talk] Perl IDE

[Jim Thomason]

On 11/30/05, JT Smith <jt at plainblack.com> wrote:
> I work on Mac, Linux, and Windows (pretty much in that order). I use Notepad++ on
> Windows sometimes, but pretty much vim everywhere. I'll probably stick with vim on Linux
> and Windows, because most of my dev work is done on Mac. So I'm really looking for
> whether getting Mac IDE will help me be more productive.

It depends upon how much of a pain in the ass you find vim. I use it
for about 33% of my dev work (50% of my perl), but I mainly open it up
to edit existing code or write short programs, I rarely will write a
large hunk of an app or a new module in vim. I don't like it for big
stuff. A former coworker of mine used vim exclusively and knew the
editor so well that he made me look like a total n00b by comparison.
He hated using anything else.

So if you're really truly a vim guy and love it through and through,
I'd say stick with it.

Me? Since I'm a Mac guy first and a developer second, I really like
Text Wrangler from Bare Bones. Way back in the day, I used BBEdit
(also from Bare Bones) and that's what I did the bulk of my
development on for about 7 years. Text Wrangler is Bare Bones' current
free product. It does virtually everything BBEdit does, and the stuff
it doesn't do I don't miss. And it's a good $150 cheaper (or so, I
can't recall exactly).

You can syntax check and run your code from directly within it, and it
has a built in ftp/sftp client for editing code directly on a remote
server.

XCode I use exclusively for my objective-C and the only time I've done
any perl work in it is the once-in-a-blue-moon when I fire up a
camelbones project. I like XCode. It's a really good IDE, but I
personally don't see any benefit to doing my perl development in it.
If you're mainly interested in using a real true IDE, I can say that
XCode is a good one and I like using it, but I can't vouch for whether
or not it'd be a good choice for Perl.

I find that Text Wrangler and vim go well together. One's better at
some things, the other's better at others. Right tool for the job,
that sort of thing.

-Jim.....