First impressions on Padre (running on Windows Vista)

I played with Padre (v0.27) a bit today while working on twit.pl v0.2.0.
Here are my first impressions...
The Good

• When I used the length and print functions, a tip window appeared below the cursor to show the function's prototype and a help message.
• An "Install Module" menu that lets you install CPAN modules as if you were typing "install ModuleName" in a CPAN shell.
• The "Automatic bracket completion" feature seems to work pretty well. As a rule, I would recommend leaving it on all the time. It is good practice to write the closing bracket (or parenthesis) right after the opening one and fill in the blank. This feature will do the job for you by adding the closing bracket character automatically.
  The only time when it can be annoyaing is if you go back in the code and add a bracket or parenthesis. Then you will have to delete the extra closing character.
• The "Toggle comment" command accessible by the right-click menu: just select the lines you want to (un)comment and Padre will add (or remove) the '#' characters in front of the lines for you.

The Bad

• Just a feeling of "still a lot to do" to compete with an editor like Notepad++ (although Padre really is an IDE, not just an editor)
• Not "super easy" to install (from CPAN, need to use the "force install Padre" command): no installer file for easy deployment.
• I entered my second ticket on Padre v0.27 today about an unwanted application exit when trying to view the CPAN config file.
• You can select your syntax highlighting scheme (Padre, Notepad++, Dark background and UltraEdit at the moment) but there is no way yet to chose formatting by categories (keywords, comments, etc.)

The Ugly

• Nothing in this category yet as far as I'm concerned

Perl blogroll
On a totally unrelated subject, I just set up the new "Blog List" widget of Blogger. Chek out for yourself on the right. It displays the blogs by order of most recent activity with a link on that last post. I think it looks pretty nice.
Also, I discovered two sites that are aggregates of Perl blogs. There are some slight differences between the two but most of the posts are similar:

• Perlsphere
• Planet Perl

Larry Wall quote of the day:
"The world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe. "

Possible next posts:

• Install Google Analytics on your Blogger blog and stats for DLP
• Improving on twit.pl: using more of the Net::Twitter API
• Some post about Padre
• Improving on twit.pl: Graphical User interface
• Perl help resources
• POD