If you've never tried Padre, or are one of the people that only looked at the very earliest 0.01 or similar releases, with 0.14 out it's time you took a(nother) look at Padre.
More experience with Wx has lead to a far more streamlined, if still sparse, user interface. Personally, I don't mind that the lack of clutter (except for the GLARING lack of a "close file" button).
We now have the beginning stages of a Document model and context aware menus, although the appearance and hiding of the "Perl" menu doesn't work quite as elegant as I had hoped.
So now, unlike the earliest editors, Padre is now a FAR superior Perl editor compared to Windows Notepad. :)
The Plugin API is crude but works, in about an hour I managed to build myself a plugin that integrates pip pip support, allowing you to type in any tarball file name or URI and have it installed by the CPAN client with output spooling to the output panel.
Unfortunately, since I can't install Wx on my debian build server, I can't upload the plugin to CPAN yet. But I'm working on that problem.
The beginnings of deeply Perl-aware functions like the "Find Unmatched Brace" tool work pretty well, demonstrating proper PPI integration.
The PPI integration layer should now be usable for Plugin authors, meaning that anything you've already written that is driven by PPI should be portable to work inside of Padre.
For me, the next phase of development should hopefully see the addition of Project support. By that, of course, I don't mean crude root directory selection and manual adding and removing files to the project.
I mean that if you open up a test file, Padre will Just Know that it's part of a larger distribution. And because it's a Perl module, perhaps some "Run Test" and "Run All Tests" or maybe even "Build Release" or "CPAN Release" menu entries or buttons will appear when that file is open.
Experience has shown us that the tools we create to support CPAN development are the ones that companies ultimately ending up adopting. So there's no reason not to build in special functionality for CPAN module development, maintenance and release right from the earliest days of the editor.
It should hopefully also let me achieve one of my real want-to-haves, which is an "Open Padre" button that lets you open the editor's own code as a Project.
I took a quick look at Padre but didn't find the output panel, or how to use it (?)
Btw do you plan to add some class/method introspection help, based on PPI?
Re:Output panel?
Alias on 2008-10-29T11:30:45
Class perhaps...
Methods aren't accurately resolvable, so that might not happen quickly.
