What are the most important features of an IDE for Perl development?

Question

As some of you might know I am the lead developer of Padre, The Perl IDE. In the first year of its development, Padre became an acceptable text editor with some extra features for Perl development.

I'd like to ask the Stack Overflow community for some help in driving the project further to turn it into an exceptional IDE for Perl development. So I'd be glad to read what do you think are the most important features of an IDE that are still missing from Padre?.

Especially I'd be interested in people who currently use Eclipse+EPIC, Komodo, Visual Studio, or any of the text editors for programmers.

Answer 1

I use emacs. I would like a system that helps me refactor code, especially when I'm working on ugly 1999 code that uses the begin-at-the-beginning-go-to-the-end philosophy combined with duplicate-and-modify.

I looked at Eclipse, but I can't work with a system that requires me to create a project before I can make a one-character correction to a file.

I looked at Padre, but it's slow and crashes.

I looked at Kod which claims to be configured by CSS, but I can't find a man page that will tell me where to put the CSS.

Answer 2

The question seems more debatable than answerable. Risking myself of being accused copyright abuser, I will post contents that I remember from the book "Interactive programming environments" by David R. Barstow, Howard E. Shrobe, Erik Sandewall.

It will not be exactly the same, as I have read the book many years ago and I've jotted down it in another language.

PRINCIPLES OF A GOOD INTERACTIVE PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT

1: Know the user
    + Know the previous knowledge and practice of the user
    
2: Minimize the memorization
    + Selection and not characters entering
    + Names and not numbers
    + Predictable behavior: the user should have a previous impression of what the system will do
    + Possible access and changing of the parameters of the system      

3: Optimization of operations
    + Fast execution of common operations
    + Inertia of visualization: the screen should change the less possible
    + Memorization of system operation in user's memory
    + The meaning of specific operations should have a simple relationship with the state of the system
    + The system must be prepared to accept more than 10 followed commands per second, so that it can operate on the user's muscular memory
    + The system should be prepared to organize the parameters of a command

4: Engineer for the errors
    + Provide good error messages.
    + Engineer it to remove away the common errors.
    + The system should provide reversible actions.
    + Redundancy: the operations should have more than one way of being done.
    + Integrity of data structures.

Answer 3

I am a heavy Perl EPIC user and my biggest gripe is not being able to jump to a function that is clearly defined in the current context (usually by pressing F3). It is pretty much hit or miss at this point.

Answer 4

Integration of a read-eval-print loop. As a heavy Emacs user, I very much appreciate Sepia. Very useful for trying things out before I commit them to code.

Answer 5

Visual-Studio style refactoring for variables and function names and extraction of functions. Visual studio searches your whole module for all references and allows you to see all changed lines in case you do not want to change one instance (for whatever reason)...

Answer 6

Good VCS integration. This is something that I absolutely love in Eclipse: You instantly see what files have local changes and which aren't added to the repository yet. And you get to browse the different versions and have a nice diff view just one mouse click away.

Answer 7

This can be possibly achieved via use strict; but could be as well a valuable feature even if not use'd explicitly, namely:

the other day we spent about 10-20 minutes debugging the following behavior:

my %hash;

$hash->{'key1'} = value1;

# on reading in a different module
print $hash{'key1'}; # is, of course, empty, but was so easy to overlook in the code above

resume: proper Perl type safety brought in by the IDE.

It might be already implemented in Padre, though, as it turned out not in Eclipse+EPIC

Answer 8

A project manager. It's essential for me to be able to define the set of files and folders that comprise a particular codebase. Sessions are useful but not a replacement.

Answer 9

Line ending policies for files, by directory, and project-wide.

So, for a given project or directory, I'd like to make all line endings be LF only. While in another directory I may wish to have a mix of CRLF and LF files.

I work a lot on stuff that goes back and forth between Unix and Win32 environments.

The typical solution of automatically converting all files back and forth as one moves from platform to platform hasn't worked well for me.

When a file gets created in the wrong format by accident, it can be a real pain.

Answer 10

Testing integration.

Perl has great unit testing tools. When I run my test suite and get a failure, I want to see the code for the test that failed.

Having a good way to jump through test results and see the code for the failed test along with the expected and actual results would be a great boon.

Answer 11

The ability to configure and run external (command-line) tools. Plug-ins are great but end-users won't necessarily want to author one just to integrate with an external tool. Allowing users to configure their own tools provides a great deal of extensibility with minimal barriers to entry.

My editor of choice is UltraEdit. It's not an IDE, but through its support for user tools, I've been able to integrate IDE features such as lint, version control, debugging, and more.

Answer 12

OK, here's my third answer, although I hate to say it.

The competition is pretty easy to install. Padre isn't. I tried to update to the latest release today and, once again, got failing tests.

Answer 13

Ability to create and debug XS code.

Answer 14

The two most invaluable features I find:

• line-by-line debugging, watchpoints, breakpoints, and so on, so I can properly debug my code.
• code completion so I don't have to go looking up docs (even online).

Answer 15

The first thing I look for is some kind of overview of the currently active file. I'd like to see methods/functions and, if possible, the used modules and especially any use base statements.

You solved that pretty well in Padre.

Answer 16

The most important feature of an IDE for Perl development (including Padre) is:

an interactive debugger that actually works. E.g. remembering breakpoints, ability to drill down into complicated data structures, and copy (to clipboard) should work on watched variables - including a menu command Copy Special that allows putting it in various formats; say CSV, XML or tab-separated.

Answer 17

Stability. People turn away quickly if their editor crashes and they lose their work.

Answer 18

I work with Komodo. I also use other editors but I come back to Komodo most of the time. A good IDE shoud have:

1. A good Debugger. Breakpoints, watch lists, everything you need.
2. Remote debugging. Threads debugging capability.
3. Syntax highlighting including weighted fonts as well ( I was pretty disappointed by Oxygen, for example, an XSLT IDE, where I can not use bold fonts to emphasize reserved terms)
4. Syntax completion.
5. Project management tools, preferable extendable by plugins.

Answer 19

I don't know if Padre can do this, but the ability to split the screen is very important to me. As a VIM user, I constantly split my screen to look at another file while coding.

Answer 20

The ability to use my own choice of editor (which it may have, as far as I know). That has a chance of winning over the vim/emacs people.