Improving the Padre experience
After the chat about the Moose web site that resulted in a post about Improving the Moose experience I asked foxfirefey to look at the Padre website as well with a fresh and critical eye.
Here is what she wrote:
First thing about the Padre website: I don't see a screenshot of the program in action.
I've heard you described it as being something friendly for newbies to learn Perl on, but I don't see that as a listed feature.
When I look at it, I want to know what it can do that my current thing doesn't?. Granted, IDEs have always intimidated me, because for some reason I find it hard to do things in them that I know how to do on the command line.
So, for instance, syntax checking.
My current stuff doesn't do that, but what does the syntax checking do?
Does it check on the fly as I finish a line? Is it an action I run?
Does it warn me if I'm using strict and bust a variable name I haven't declared yet?
I'm curious, is there a console with Padre that I can do Perl on the fly in?
Refactoring tools: what kind of refactoring tools? Does it help me rename variables? Turn sets of functions into classes?
Context sensitive help: I think I've heard you mention autocompletion, is that under this category? Or looking up system functions on the fly?
Padre walkthrough for newbies "Installing Padre" and then "Using Padre on DreamWidth code" and then "Making changes with Padre" and an overview of how Padre's features work when trying to code. Not just how to use Padre, but specific examples of using Padre on the code
I did a bug walkthrough on DreamWidth to try and help somebody who didn't know where to start It was less helpful for them than it could have been BUT other people did ones after me that were much better
I'd like to thank foxfirefey, for the comments. I think it will help us a lot to improve the content on the Padre web site.