haj

Since almost forever, Emacs supports editing Perl sources with CPerl mode. As of now, CPerl mode is not only shipped with Emacs, but also available on GNU ELPA. ELPA stands for Emacs Lisp Package Archive, it is for Emacs what CPAN is for Perl. This means that to use the newest CPerl mode, you do not have to wait for the next Emacs version: If you use M-x list-packages, you should see cperl-mode in the list and can install it if you have Emacs 27 or newer.

The current version of CPerl mode supports Perl syntax up to Perl 5.44.

For bug reports and change requests, you can use M-x report-emacs-bug from within Emacs (be sure to add "cperl-mode" to the subject), or create an issue on my GitHub mirror. Development will not happen on GitHub, though, this happens in the GNU Emacs repository at savannah.

Happy hacking!

-- haj, your friendly CPerl mode maintainer

Emacs comes with two different major modes to edit Perl code: perl-mode and cperl-mode.

perl-mode is somewhat stuck with the Perl syntax of 5.14, has less features, but a cleaner implementation. cperl-mode is up to date with Perl 5.38 and has deeper understanding of Perl syntax, but a somewhat arcane implementation, most of it written in the previous century.

With all due respect to TIMTOWTDI, maintaining two major modes turns out to be not enough fun in the long run, and last week Stefan Kangas opened a wishlist item to /var/www/users/haj/index.html

If you are an Emacs user, you might know or even use cperl-mode. I am using it, more or less since my first days with Perl. Back then, newsgroups were a thing, and Ilya Zakharevich recommended it occasionally. In older times cperl-mode was shipped with Perl, today it is part of Emacs.
Perl, on the other hand, evolves. Version 5.32, for example, brings a new infix operator, an…