For many years the favored editor for Perl developers fell under the same umbrella as the favored editor in *nix. A major fight between Vi and Emacs, and all the other options trailing behind somewhere.
Over the past year, a team of developers has been working to change that. The result is the Padre editor, or the Perl Application Development and Refactoring Environment. The Padre team recently released their 0.5 revision and let me tell you, it is fantastic.
With the 0.5 release there are two particularly interesting developments. They are a Mac standalone package and a self-contained Windows package. This makes Padre extremely easy to install on the two most common desktop systems and puts it on level ground with all your other editing options. If you don't read another word, grab a copy and try it. * (... screenshot after the break)*
Being a long time vi user (And more recently a Textmate convert) I was not really in the market for a new editor. That said, the new release is a vast improvement over the Padre of even just a few months ago. In my opinion Padre is 100% ready for daily use, and the Padre team are committed to improving it even further.
Kudos to the Padre team. Padre 0.5 has done what I thought was unthinkable, it has threatened to topple Textmate as my primary editor. My prediction the 1.0 release of Padre will be the gold standard editor for Perl developers. It's already well on it's way.
If you haven't tried it, grab the package for your system (or do the install via CPAN) and take it for a spin. You won't be disappointed.
Oh, and as promised:
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