What's new in Padre 0.46

Padre 0.46 was released a couple of days ago by our new and cool Padre release maintainer Ryan Niebur. First of all, thanks for all the great effort that Padre developers and translators put into this release. This release includes a lot of stability bug-fixes and feature upgrades. It also coincides with Curtis Jewell's Padre standalone 0.45 win32 release which has a more recent version of Strawberry Perl.

How to install it?

• Remove any previous Strawberry or Almost Six installation. Please Make sure that c:\strawberry is not there after Removal.
• Download and install Padre Standalone 0.45 release to obtain the latest in Perl's CPAN world.
• In your command line, run the one-liner upgrade script to upgrade to Padre 0.46:
  perl -MCPAN -e "CPAN->upgrade('/^Padre/')"
• Run "Padre" shortcut from your start menu.

What's new?

Here are some of the features that are in this release:

Smart highlighting

Simply double click on a word to show all of its occurrences in the current document.

A better help search dialog (Shortcut: F2)

Press F2 on any thing in your script and help search will try to find its documentation. In some case where the cursor is above a special character, you may need to select it first and then press F2. The following is currently included in the help index:

• Perl core language reference (e.g. perlintro)
• Perl pragmas (e.g. strict, warnings)
• Perl core modules (e.g. File::Spec)
• Perl variables (e.g. @_, $_)
• Perl functions (e.g. print, open)
• Perl operators reference (e.g. X and Y, !X). This is taken from cowens's perlopref.pod github project.

Detection of common beginner errors

Padre can now detect common beginner errors when in beginner mode which can be turned on in Edit -> Preferences. Simply run a Perl script using "Run -> Run Script (F5)" or "Perl -> Common (beginner) errors" and it will catch most of the errors detailed in the PerlMonks "Little annoying mistakes" post.

Extract subroutine

Yes! Padre has an exciting extract subroutine refactoring tool which is based on Devel::Refactor. This is totally experimentally and will likely improve quite a bit in future releases. It is accessible from the Perl menu.