My client has given developers a lot of liberty to set up the devel environment they like. Aside from the obvious Debian Linux and Apache, I've always used vi/vim for Perl code devel. I've tried some IDEs over the years but the learning curve was too low (i.e. too long to learn fully). I remember using ptkdb years ago and it was great but the next place I worked at wouldn't let me install Tk. So I've always tried to use the bare minimum toolset with Perl: vi/vim and perl -d.
However last year I decided that if I was going to use vim because it, like Perl, is available on every system I work with, I had better use it as efficiently as possible.
The first thing I looked at was the Best of Vim Tips. Oh! if only I had read it years ago...
Then I decided to search http://www.vim.org for Perl plugins. Jackpot! I found perl-support.vim and tagmenu.vim. Now I could churn out Perl code as fast as I could think.
The only annoyance for me was that the keyboard shortcut for tagmenu clashed with one in perl-support. So I opened tagmenu.vim with gvim (Escher's drawing of the hand drawing the hand comes to mind) and changed the shortcut. This meant I had to maintain my own version of tagmenu and I never got around to troubling the author to change it but tagmenu hadn't changed for years (note that: I could have used it *years* ago) so it wasn't urgent.
Well, frabjous day!, as part of this recent install I've installed a more recent version of perl-support and it no longer clashes with tagmenu. All those years of using vi and vim now pay off because I can write and test my Perl code and my HTML code with the minimum of keystrokes (think 'RSI') and I rarely have to think which keys to use anyway. And I don't have to take my hand off the keyboard to use the mouse.
Of course, this only benefits crusty old curmudgeons like me who've built up the keyboard habits.
