Trying out Padre 0.47

This is written after a few days of trying Padre. Normally I use emacs, joe, Komodo Edit/IDE, kate, and recently geany, so this post is basically about comparing Padre's editing features with these other editors.

Note: Yup, 0.48 was already out a couple of weeks ago, but I haven't been able to install it due to segfaults in libwx*. Incidentally my box was recently upgraded from Jaunty to Karmic so that might have caused the problem. Anyway, I did read the 0.48's ChangeLog just in case.

First and foremost, I'm blown away! Between my first try a few months back and 0.47, Padre has tranformed into a very usable editor/IDE, and it's pretty fast too, faster than Komodo IDE/Edit which is notoriously sluggish. Kudos to the hardworking Padre team, you guys rock!

Here are the features which I find still missing:

• a button (or keyboard shortcut) to quickly toggle on/off the directory tree.
  
• next-tab and prev-tab functionality. There is next-file and prev-file, but after you rearrange the tabs, those two become less useful. Maybe assign Ctrl-PgUp/PgDn or Alt-Left/Right for this?
  
• justify/reflow paragraph/manual word wrap. A la emacs' M-q or joe's C-kj.
  
• autodelete trailing whitespaces when saving (and autoadd newline at the end if missing).
  
• remember folding state when reopening files.
  
• (Bug?) the "autofold POD when folding is enabled" feature is very nice, but right now is behaving rather strangely. It only works after I open Preferences and hit Save. Opening or saving files does not automatically fold PODs as advertised.
  
• maybe include something like Rx Toolkit in Komodo? Because I do write a *lot* of regexes when coding in Perl.
  
• (Suggestion) soft characters for automatic bracket completion. I find this feature in Komodo very very nice as I seem to have the habit of typing { or (, and then after thinking a while cancel it.
  

I'd gladly submit these into Padre's Trac if someone would give me an account. Last time I visited #padre no one had the admin rights to do this. Signup from the website is temporarily disabled to overwhelming amount of spam.

Anyway, keep up the wonderful work, guys! Looking forward to using Padre more and more often in the future. Envisioning writing Padre config files in Perl, just like in emacs using Lisp... Life will be good...