Affrus 1.0

Late Night Software, makers of the excellent Script Debugger, has released a Perl editor and debugger called Affrus. I’ve been trying it in beta form for a while, and am very impressed. The syntax coloring is smart. Affrus knows whether a variable is global (package) or local (my), and it shows this by coloring local variables orange and global ones black (and there are more colors, e.g. for cases like $_). This helps to remind me when I forget that Perl variables are not local by default, as in all the other scripting languages I use.

Another example: when you Control-click somewhere in the code, Affrus shows a pop-up menu listing the local variables that are in scope. It should go without saying that Affrus is AppleScriptable, attachable, and recordable, and that it supports Edit With BBEdit.