[Zel2008]

Hi all,

I wasn't sure which forum to put this in, so mods, feel free to move it if it's in the wrong place.

Anyway, I've inherited a massive Perl project, with over 1000 files. Some of them are over 20,000 lines long. I've spent the last few months trying to work with the files on Emacs, but they're formatted so badly that a lot of the shortcuts for Emacs don't work on Emacs. I can't collapse methods and conditionals reliably, for example.

So, I was trying to find a better IDE, and settled on the EPIC Perl extension to Eclipse, or so I thought. It handles syntax highlighting and searching properly (for the most part), but doesn't seem to have the method and conditional collapsing that I need so much. The code I have has methods defined inside methods and massive conditionals, so this collapsing behavior is essential.

I'm working on a Linux box after many failed attempts to set up a Perl server on a Mac box, and Windows is out of the question, as is rewriting the code to be more manageable without an IDE (not my choice, just the way it has to be).

So -- is the Eclipse EPIC plugin the best I can do for an IDE, or is there something better out there? Any references anyone could give me would be great. It takes me half an hour at least to find anything in Emacs, and the EPIC Eclipse plugin helps a little, but I still spend a lot of time scrolling through lots of code.

Thanks,
Zel2008

[Shazgurot]

Have you tried Perl TT Editor or Vim ?

[Zel2008]

Hi Shazgurot,
Thanks for the input. Vim didn't do the trick for me, but I'll definitely try the other one you suggested; didn't know there were so many Eclipse plugins.
Thanks,
Zel2008

[Shazgurot]

Glad to help out

[Lemur]

Vim is a serious power house, but rarely appreciated by uninitiated. It honestly takes a good deal of time to get proficiency with it, but once you do your workflow takes off like crazy.

A few quick features frequently overlooked:
> Split Screens
> Tabs
> File Browser
> Inline Regex support
> 95% of all relevant command keys clustered together, and easy to get to fast

Read up and experiment with it for a while. I promise that if you take the time to learn it, you'll be greatly rewarded for taking the time.