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I am looking for a Perl 6 plugin for JetBrains editors like IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm or PhpStorm.

Connected issue:

https://github.com/Camelcade/Perl5-IDEA/issues/1554

Can anyone can recommend something? Or should I try a different IDE?

Now syntax is wrongly highlighted because I use the plugin for Perl 5

Christopher Bottoms
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Daniel
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2 Answers2

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I can't speak for IntelliJ editors (of which I have heard great things by my colleagues).

Vim works well

Vim has built-in support for Perl 6. I used to hate vim, until I saw an experienced user demonstrate it. You can move, copy, paste, search and replace, and so forth without touching a mouse or having to scroll through a menu. I haven't turned back since. For me, it has really been worth the time and effort to learn.

But I must warn you that Vim may not work well for you if you are not a touch typist. Vim really stands out because it takes advantage of reflexes (i.e. "muscle memory"). You think about moving your cursor up and your fingers reflexively hit k without thinking about it. You want to copy a line, so you hit yy without even thinking about it. It's the closest thing to a brain-computer interface without having to undergo surgery. It just takes some initial effort to start learning it and customizing it.

examples

When code is very cleanly written, it tends to look nice:

Code in Vim showing consistent syntax coloring throughout.

But, sometimes Vim does have a problem parsing Perl 6 and coloring correctly, especially if there is a lot of syntax in the same line. These cases tend to be less human-friendly anyway. When I noticed the following inconsistent syntax coloring, I refactored the code to be the more human-friendly (and Vim friendly) style seen above.

Code in Vim showing strange syntax coloring in the bottom third.

Since only Perl 6 can fully parse Perl 6, I would expect that there to be sometimes that most editors would have difficulties with the syntax highlighting for Perl 6. Please comment or add other answers if you find editors that do better than Vim in this regard.

And sometimes Vim will temporarily color the syntax funny, but scrolling up and down will give it a chance to correct itself.

UPDATE: Now there is an IntelliJ plugin, see Jonathan Worthington's answer about Comma.

Christopher Bottoms
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  • The one downside of vim are the missing refactoring and search capabilities. Plus, if you want to do true OOP, single responsibility style, you can't just write a call to a new, imagined object and type alt-enter and boom, a new file with a function / class is created to fill out. That's the reason why old-school 90s programmers tend to write 1500 lines long methods: too much work to write subroutines / objects. – yeoman Mar 07 '21 at 06:23
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Comma is a Perl 6 IDE built on the IDEA platform, and also comes as a plugin to be used with IntelliJ and similar. It's currently in early BETA, and available to those who join its supporter program.

Jonathan Worthington
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