IDE for Strawberry Perl for Windows

Padre makes a great IDE for Strawberry Perl.

[Originally posted 2016 May 8, updated 2019 March 13]

I had been looking for a Perl IDE to use with Strawberry Perl on my main Windows machine. Years ago I had used Eclipse PDE, but I was looking for something else. Padre seemed ideal, but the installation was based on its own perl environment, whereas I already had Strawberry Perl installed. Fortunately I found some alternative instructions for this.

http://padre.perlide.org/download/strawberryperl.html

Unfortunately installation did have some challenges as neither the Padre website or cpan modules have been updated since 2013.

https://metacpan.org/changes/distribution/Padre

(through there are recent bug fixes at the official Padre Github)

https://github.com/PadreIDE/Padre

First install Strawberry Perl for Windows (currently v5.28.1)

http://strawberryperl.com/

Install the Padre prerequisites. This will take a long time, so be patient. I found that some of them would not install as some of their tests failed; using the force option bypassed these.

C:\> cpanm Alien::wxWidgets 
C:\> cpanm Wx --force 
C:\> cpanm ORLite::Migrate --force 

Install Padre

c:\> cpanm Padre --force

There are a few known issues with the version in cpan.

Test run using

C:\strawberry\perl\site\bin\padre.bat

Malformed UTF-8 character: \xe0\x20\x6c (unexpected non-continuation byte 0x20, immediately after start byte 0xe0; need 3 bytes, got 1) at C:/Apps/Strawberry/perl/site/lib/Padre/Wx/Main.pm line 5564. 
Malformed UTF-8 character (fatal) at C:/Apps/Strawberry/perl/site/lib/Padre/Wx/Main.pm line 5564. 
Compilation failed in require at C:/Apps/Strawberry/perl/site/lib/Padre/Wx/App.pm line 58. 
Perl exited with active threads:
         1 running and unjoined
         0 finished and unjoined
         0 running and detached

This is fixed by commit a3df4d7b8a765f1d0303410cdc686d4bf8adabdc

https://github.com/PadreIDE/Padre/commit/a3df4d7b8a765f1d0303410cdc686d4bf8adabdc

In C:\Strawberry\perl\site\lib\Padre\Wx\Main.pm, remove the Read-Only file attribute and change line 5564 which contains an invalid Uni-code character (à). Change this to a regular character (a).

Join current line with next one (à la B<vi> with C<Ctrl+J>). No return value.

Testing again gives

DBD::SQLite::db do failed: Safety level may not be changed inside a transaction at (eval 1954) line 37. 
Perl exited with active threads:
 1 running and unjoined
 0 finished and unjoined
 0 running and detached

This is a known problem fixed by commit a9fb73f6b0ba76370f60300edfaf03f50e8326e0

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34787579/padre-complains-about-an-sqlite-database-issue

https://github.com/DBD-SQLite/DBD-SQLite/issues/10

https://github.com/PadreIDE/Padre/commit/a9fb73f6b0ba76370f60300edfaf03f50e8326e0#diff-13b15178914b37760864cbbc3c935b6d

In C:\Strawberry\perl\site\lib\Padre\Locker.pm, remove the Read-Only file attribute and move line 105 after line 113.

sub db_increment {
     my $self = shift;
     unless ( $self->{db_depth}++ ) {
         Padre::DB->begin;
             # ...
         Padre::DB->pragma( synchronous => 0 );
     }
     return;
 }

to:

sub db_increment {
     my $self = shift;
     unless ( $self->{db_depth}++ ) {
         #...
         Padre::DB->pragma( synchronous => 0 );
         Padre::DB->begin;
     }
     return;
 } 

Create a desktop shortcut with

Target: C:\Strawberry\perl\site\bin\padre.exe
Start in: C:\Strawberry\perl\site\bin

The IDE should now start by double clicking the shortcut.

Happy coding.