Padre

For a long time I thought it would be a good idea to have an editor written in Perl. Especially after seeing Strawberry Perl and that I might have the opportunity to shape it a little bit by buying a drink for Adam Kennedy I thought it would be cool if there was and IDE that came with Strawberry Perl or at least with Chocolate Perl.

So I started to write one in Gtk2. I used that toolkit as I preferred it over Tk.

Then Adam pointed out that he would only include it if it was written in Wx as it needs to be similar to standard MS Windows applications. He even directed me to Kephra as that's an editor written in Perl using WxWidgets. I got in touch with Herbert, the author, got commit bit and even made some changes and added a few tests.

There were a couple of issues that stopped me from working on it more. First of all I had some general concerns about writing a new editor for Perl. I wrote about it earlier: Open Source IDE for Perl with several good comments. That an lack of time stopped me from continuing.

Then I also had some concerns specificly with Kephra. Most notably the fact that I felt Herbert wants to make sure the system is backward compatible for the current users. This makes perfect sense for him but I felt it will hinder my progress.

Besides, I wanted to invent my own wheel.

So about two weeks ago first I started to play around with Wx and then started to write a new editor. First I thought it was just for learning WxWidgets but I got carried away.

In addition last week my client noticed they have forgotten to renew my contract so I was out of paid work for a week. (They still have not managed to write the PO, but now I have other clients.)

That was a great time to work on this project.

In a few days I managed to make it work reasonably well so I could start using it.

It was extremely annoying but it worked.

After a while my biggest problem was how to name it. so I even asked your help: Name a Perl IDE - get a Perl book or YAPC ticket. I got many good suggestions, especially from the PerlMonks but in the and I decided on something that seems to be my own crazy idea.

Padre stands for Perl Application Development and Refactoring Environment.

As its name says it is planned to be something even bigger than just and IDE. So as I aim extremely high, the likeliness that it will fail is almost 100%. I'll sell tickets for those who want to come an laugh.

I hope thought that this name will get all the PerlMonks want to help with the project.

You can download it from a CPAN mirror near-by. You can look at it here: [dist://Padre]