Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Editor Support for Debugging

The debugger’s command-line history mechanism doesn’t provide command-line editing like many shells do: you can’t retrieve previous lines with ^p, or move to the beginning of the line with ^a, although you can execute previous lines with the exclamation point syntax familiar to shell users. However, if you install the Term::ReadKey and Term::ReadLine modules from CPAN, you will have full editing capabilities similar to what GNU readline(3) provides.

If you have emacs installed on your system, it can interact with the Perl debugger to provide an integrated software development environment reminiscent of its interactions with C debuggers. Perl comes with a start file for making emacs act like a syntax-directed editor that understands (some of) Perl’s syntax. Look in the emacs directory of the Perl source distribution. Users of vi should also look into vim (and gvim, the mousey and windy version) for coloring of Perl keywords.

A similar setup by one of us (Tom) for interacting with any vendor-shipped vi and the X11 window system is also available. This works similarly to the integrated multiwindow support that emacs provides, where the debugger drives the editor. However, at the time of this writing, its eventual location in the Perl distribution is uncertain. But we thought you should know of the possibility.