I am not a command line jockey nor am I comfortable with emacs or vi.  What I am is a creature of comfort.  Since I am actively dancing around with Perl again, I thought I should find a nice IDE for Perl and found a really nice one that does exactly what I want and no more: Open Perl IDE.

Open Perl IDE is an open source Perl IDE for Windows.  All I had to do was download the Open_Perl_IDE_1.0.11.409.zip file from SourceForge and drag a single executable file (PerlIDE.exe) out of it.  PerlIDE.exe is the excutable, not an installer (sounds familiar?).

If you have perl.exe in your PATH, you can just run the IDE, write some perl statements into a file, and Run it.  Yes, it has a source debugger.  If perl.exe is not in your PATH, you can specify its location via the Preferences dialog under the Edit menu.

Have fun.  I know I am having fun.  Only sour point that my Camel Perl book is 11 years old.  Assuming Perl changed a lot in 11 years, I will have to get a more recent copy although I can see that the latest version covers only Perl 5.6.  Maybe I should just fill a slot in my teeny O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf until the 4th edition comes out.

I find Safari Bookshelf to be too slow for my taste and it's annoying that I have to be online while I am coding so I can access the bookshelf.  Only usable forms of documentation for me are CHM (HTMLHelp) or real books.  PDF?  Books in PDF format may make sense for sloths, but not people.  Maybe I'll get the Perl CD Bookshelf.  I heard that they contain CHM versions of the books.  I maybe wrong of course.