Padre, the Perl IDE
I have been using Emacs for decades. I am totally happy with it (indeed, it keeps getting better and better!) and am not looking for another editor. Nonetheless I like to keep abreast of things, so when new tools become available, I like to check them out.
For a while now, I have been hearing about Padre, an IDE written in Perl. However, until recently, I wasn't able to get it to work. Granted, I never tried anything more than
PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT=1 cpan Padre
but for version 0.50 and below that always failed one or more tests, so I didn't install it.
I recently tried installing version 0.50 on a Windows machine with the fancy .msi installer (recommended!). It appeared to install okay, but when I ran it, nothing happened. Nothing. At all. So I tried to uninstall it, but that just hung the machine. Grr. After powering the thing off and back on again, I removed the C:\strawberry directory and then ran uninstall. Whew!
But today I ran
PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT=1 cpan Padre
and version 0.51 of Padre installed without error!
So I started it up. It took a long time to start, which I kind of expected, but then I opened a file and it took a really long time before the "File Dialog" started up. I wasn't expecting that. But eventually it opened and I did the little file dialogue dance until I found the file I wanted (is this really how people want to work? maybe I'm just not cut out for GUIs, in general). I opened a small Perl 5 program and it was all highlighted nice 'n pretty. I was able to run it inside of Padre. Change it. Save it. Run it again. Great! Seems to work fine.
Then I tried opening a Perl 6 program, but it didn't recognize it. The file displayed fine, but it was not syntax-highlighted and I could not run it. The file had a .p6 extension and perl6 in the shebang line, but I guess neither of those is what Padre is looking for. So I tried opening a new "Perl 6 script". That opened a new file with some Perl 6 boilerplate filled in, but it was highlighted with Perl 5 rules, I think. When I typed in some Perl 6 code, it didn't highlight it. And it still wasn't able to run it.
That was about the extent of my testing. I know that's not much, but I had to stop because the Windows keybindings were too annoying. One consequence of decades of Emacs use is you type certain key sequences without thinking about it. Because of the magic of GNU readline, these key sequences work in bash and a host of other places as well. Plus I have GTK and Gnome configured to use "Emacs" mode, so those key sequences work in programs like Firefox too. Thus this text that I am typing right now in my browser has been done with many Emacs editing sequences. If I want to move down three lines, I am going to hit "Ctrl N N N" and dammit, I don't want to see three new browser windows open up!
Padre appears to have the typical Windows keybindings all set up and no obvious way to change them. I see someone else mentioned this thirteen months ago, but nothing seems to have come of it. But until some alternate keybindings are available, I can't really use Padre.
I blog about Perl.
Thanks for trying Padre.
A couple of comments:
The initial start-up problem on Windows is known - until we manage to release a new fixed version, we should probably add a "Known issues" page to the download page. (Before the padre.exe starts working it has to be launched once using padre.bat)
Padre Standalone for Windows does not contain the Perl 6 plugin so it won't recognize Perl 6 files. At a later point it probably will contain it just as the Padre stand-alone for Linux contains it.
I have no idea why the slowness. If you have time visiting the #padre channel on irc.perl.org we can try to take a look at it.
It might be already possible to implement the Emacs key-binding if someone has the tuits for that.
Thanks for your comments!
I re-installed the Windows version and ran padre.bat. That started up just as you said and now clicking on Padre starts padre, as expected.
The "File Dialog" started up reasonably fast in Windows too. In fact, I just tried it again on the Linux machine that I normally use and it's starting up quickly on there as well. I don't know what the problem was before, but I can't seem to duplicate it.
I'm not sure I understand the Perl 6 comments. All of the original post except that one install attempt refers to Linux. Indeed, the only reason I tried it in Windows is because it wasn't working in Linux and I thought, "surely they have the fancy Windows installer thing working."