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I have recently started working with Perl. Googling reveals a number of editors but I am unable to find an editor that will help me navigate a large body of Perl source code. One of the features that I am looking for is the ability of the IDE to integrate with different modules and allow me to jump from one to another. If possible, it will also help if one can see the which function calls what.
I used source insight for C programming and it provides these very useful features. Am looking for similar features in perl.
Help appreciated
Have you looked at Padre? It is a Perl IDE developed by the Perl community.
I'm just giving EPIC a chance.
http://www.epic-ide.org/
Its an Eclipse plugin utilizing a mighty IDE. The advantage I see in using EPIC over Padre is the fact that eclipse can do all sorts of languages and I don't have to get used to multiple different editors every time.
Another great aproach for Perl programming is using emacs. Yes ... its old but I had quite some joy while getting into Perl.
cu
Roman
Komodo IDE, from Active State is also quite good. I haven't used any other Perl IDEs so cannot make comparisons. Most of the features that you are looking for I believe are available in Komodo.
On a side note: The feature that I most appreciated in Komodo was visual debugging.
I mainly use jEdit for Perl programming.
The PerlSideKick plugin, allows you to navigate huge Perl modules (mainly just a plugin for the SideKick plugin).
But there's not much to give you that easy Shift+click navigation you get from Eclipse. jEdit is 100% programmable through Beanshell macros (and JavaScript and Python and JRuby...). So, you can do some of this yourself. So there would be work involved.
For example, it been close enough for me to create "Selection macros" that will allow certain actions on the package or name either highlighted or at the caret. For example, open up the module indicated by the package name.
The Navigator plugin will at least remember where you were last across files.
You might be able to do cross-module navigation through one of the tags plugins
So this won't get you all the way you'd want to go, but it will get you some of the way, and for $0.
It has the most configurable source highlighting this side of writing Emacs-LISP.
It does FTP and remote editing cleaner than most editors I've used.
You can build up a library of Beanshell (shorthand Java) scripts that really help you get what you want done.
Just remember that this recommendation comes with caveats. I have found EPIC quite sub-standard for my use.
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I started coding around 5 years ago. I was introduced through Java and Eclipse which both have substantial stigma attached in the programming community. A number of people at the company I currently intern at prefer emacs or vim. I can't see how a basic text editor is faster or easier than an IDE in general although I appreciate some things like building tend to be faster from the command line.
Is this a case of the 'old-boys' club or can it be more efficient to program a project in this way?
Can you provide some use cases to demonstrate? If I were advocating Eclipse I'd say refactoring and auto-completion were pretty handy tools.
Gav
Vim / Emacs
Very fast/efficient code writing
Low memory footprint
Quick access to command line
Infinite possibilities through scripting/plugins
Never have to leave the keyboard
Eclipse
Full-featured IDE for many languages
Great refactoring support
All of them
Cross-platform
Feature rich
Extensible through plugins
I typically find myself writing volumes of code through vim and performing debugging tasks through my IDE. Familiarity with the code base is certainly a factor, as an IDE is a great tool for jumping around and learning unfamiliar source code.
I got started in IDEs like Eclipse, but switched to Vim about 2 years ago.
Reasons you may want to use a text-mode editor:
It can be used as an IDE for just about any language (you learn it once and use it for everything)
It can do all those fancy things like auto-completion, refactoring and many more complex operations, which you can extend by adding macros or plug-ins
It works just about everywhere (and can be used through an SSH shell)
You don't need a GB of ram to run it
If you really persevere, you will find that working in an editor like this will eventually be faster, and in fact becomes ingrained as a sort of 'muscle memory'. This means you can code without slowing down to think about the process.
The argument "Eclipse for Java" is a different argument than "Eclipse for [something that isn't java]". Eclipse does rock for Java.
I mean, vi is like a screwdriver, or maybe a swiss army knife, and Eclipse is like a big CNC combo mill and asphalt spreader. You don't exactly compare them, you kind of just use both.
Also, are you working inside something giant, which you know little about, but which Eclipse understands? An example would be working on Eclipse itself. Here, Eclipse has perfect visibility, total language support, and you need the toast prompts and the documentation links.
But if you are typing in a 100-line Ruby program to convert an SQL database, Eclipse doesn't add much value, especially considering its baggage.
It's also critical to set up vi right, or you won't grok the appeal. Autoindent, showmatch, tab handling, and various other options should be set. You should have a easy way to generate a tags file. Google can find tag generators, or just write one from scratch, with a few lines of shellcode and sed(1).
I don't consider refactoring to be a criteria. That's not something you do once an hour or even once a day. Sure, fire up the big IDE when you need to refactor. Oh, and don't expect automated refactoring of anything except Java.
Finally, vi can actually do a lot of things that the IDE can't begin to do. The grouped regular expression global substitution is kind of a generalized refactor-anything engine. To appreciate the vi gestalt you need to learn the line (":") mode. Briefly, it's like having sed(1) inside your editor.
It all depends on what you want/expect and what your usage model is.
If you're looking for a Java IDE, Eclipse is difficult to beat. It's written in Java, for Java, by Java folks.
If you're looking for a tool to edit files from the command line quickly, Emacs or vi both fit the bill.
If you're looking for a tool from which you never have to leave because it can do anything you want (send/read mail, manage projects, todo lists, compile, debug, etc. etc. etc.), then Emacs is more "efficient".
If you're looking for reasons to switch editors, figure out what you want. If you want a better Eclipse, vi and Emacs won't give you that, stick to Eclipse.
If you're looking for a small, nimble editor, vi will fit the bill.
If you're looking for the ultimately extensible editor, Emacs is the way.
Whichever tool you decide to go with, immerse yourself. Learn all of the ins and outs, extend it to meet your needs. Use it to its limits and become efficient in its use.
Emacs can be a powerful IDE, but having gone from Emacs to Eclipse, I have to say I would never go back. Eclipse just offers so many features that you can't get within Emacs.
Mylyn and scoped views of the data and files I'm using, the debugging UI, CVS UI, are all built in and easy to get and use. I'll use the mouse a little to get'em.
First things first. VIM is more productive for programming than Eclipse. Your personal productity in VIM may be abysmal, but the potential cap of VIM is much higher. This is a fact.
VIM is a martial art. It feels unnatural when you first use it. And you can't even make it work. It takes years of practice to gradually become productive. You focus on mastering a little detail at first. Slowly all these bits you master add up until text is flowing effortlessly out of your finger tips onto the screen. Complicated edits that would make your co-worker sigh will jump from your hands before he can finish his exhale. There are few people who can use VIM. Fewer who can use it productivley. And you may never meet a master in your life time. But they are rumored to exist.
VIM is designed to keeep your hands on home-row. Moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse is demoralizing. It's a gross motor movement. Moving your arm has a phsycological effect that hurts your motivation. Using VIM, someone could bolt your wrists onto the keyboard and you could still easily open up files, split windows, open tabs, build the project, search/replace, change fonts, change colors, etc. And all at lightning speed.
VIM is modal. That means you don't have to do complex key combinations where you hold down control+shift+Key. This hurts your hands in the long run. Instead you execute commands. There is no need for key combos to due to the modal nature.
We store data in our memory like computers do. Our memory can only hold a few values at a time. See how many distinct integers you can hold in your head before they start to slip away. We overcome this human limitation by writing stuff down. If data falls out of our memory we can easily look at what we wrote down to get it back. If your time is spent doing gross motor, physical things you are losing time that could have been spent on processing data in your brain. You want your mind to flow onto the screen without any effort at all. It may not sound like much but VIM's ability to effortlessly transfer what is in your mind to the screen is a BIG productivity boost. It's hard to put in words what I'm trying to say.
VIM supports code completion. Both textual and look-up based. It can pull text from mulitple files. Anything you desire can be had in VIM. Either make it yourself or use something someone else cooked up.
VIM supports goign to definitions with ctags. You can also find all references of an item. Again, anything you desire can be had in VIM.
The scripting of VIM is huge. You can download or create thousands of color schemes and change colors in an instant. Try to change fonts or colors in Microsoft Visual Studio and it will hang for 20 seconds while it loads data. It won't let you store color schemes and you must spend 30 minutes tweaking your colors and fonts every time you want a change of scenery. In VIM you can set line spacing to zero to fit more lines of code on the screen. I get over 80 lines. Visual studio uses 2 pixels of spacing for every line and you can't adjust it!!! Less lines = more scrolling = less productivity = forced to use small fonts for more lines = eye strain.
Split windows are opened in an instnat in VIM. It's usefull when you need to look at data in one section of the code that's far from the place you are typing (or in a different file). You don't have to spend time resizing windows, or worry about GUI windows overlapping each other and falling behind each other. Un-related code windows can be opened in tabs as to not take up screen space, but allow quick switching.
VIM as an IDE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQy2rVOf-z0&feature=fvwrel
VIM the revenge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQNFfhC4QI8
I've used vi for years to edit code in a variety of languages, and really love it. But I've found IDEs like Eclipse to be even nicer for Java development, and now I tend to work in Eclipse almost entirely. I drop out to use vi from time to time for a few specialized activities like bulk-inserting copyright notices, mainly those dealing with certain kinds of rote edits that aren't well automated in Eclipse. I also have my Windows .java file type mapped to vi for when I just want to look at a source file without waiting for Eclipse to open up.
Some of the attractive features in Eclipse are:
method name completion
error highlighting
pop-up javadoc comments
refactoring
I do find it a lot more efficient than vi in general, so you should try it out and see if it that holds true for you too.
I remember reading somewhere about a study which showed that people perceived keyboard shortcuts as more efficient than mousing, when in fact it wasn't always.
Another psychological effect is that we attach value to things which are expensive, i.e. since Emacs is harder to learn it must be better in some way.
I think those effects could explain a lot of the extreme affection some people have for Emacs/Vi.
However, in the case of Eclipse, I find it can be very slow and even crash occasionally, but that is not a case against IDEs in general.
I use both Eclipse, VS and Emacs regularly. I would use TextMate too, but I don't have a mac anymore. It depends on what I am doing, more specifically, what system best supports my language and tools.
I know people who spend considerably more time programming their editor, than they spend doing something useful. Some of them even admit themselves that they only do it for the challenge. Other people often claim that Emacs/Vi can do much more than IDEs, because they are scriptable. Well, most IDEs (including Eclipse) can also be scripted. In that sense almost all editors are equivalent (though, I admit, some editors are more easily scripted than others).
If you like IDEs, my advice is to keep using one. There is no One True Editor.
EDIT:
This seems to be the article Nick Bastin is referring to. I agree that it is far from a definitive source. However, I still think my point about perceived and real productivity not being the same thing still holds.
It depends on the languages.
For Java or .NET use an IDE (Eclipse,Netbeans,Visual Studio...).
For almost all the other languages(C,C++,ruby,python,haskell,lisp...) vi and emacs are better in my opinion.
The efficiency provided from vim/emacs is mostly afforded by their heavy keyboard use. In these programs you can do most anything directly from the keyboard, rather than having to stop and use the mouse.
I would anytime go for emacs rather than eclipse. I also have to say that bare bone emacs, is not that great, but after some tweaking, you will never want to let it go. In particular I will tell you how helpful emacs was while writing my Master's thesis, that should make clear why Eclipse is inferior, just because it is less versatile.
I my master thesis I wrote in the following programming languages: C++, Python and R. Complementary, I had to write the thesis, for which I used LaTeX. Moreover, I had to write a bunch of shell scripts and cmake scripts. Guess what? Emacs has great support for all of it. Specially, it was a pleasure to work with AuCTeX to produce LaTeX documents. Then, Emacs provides the great ESS mode for working with R. Likewise, it provides facilities for python. Once I had my cmake scripts for building the C++ code, I only had to call compile from withing emacs and I was done. Eclipse cannot do this things altogether, therefore you will need to learn to use many different programs. Note taking? There is org-mode for that, and it is great!
And then, my program needed of a very powerful computer (not like any laptop). So, I could just do everything remotely from within emacs!!!! Using tramp, I found myself doing remote interactive evaluation of R code, remote compiling, executing and debuging C++ code, and everything within the same good local emacs window I had been using. In contrast, my friends who used a separate tool for everything were much slower in developing software that was meant to run in another computer.
Like this I have some other stories, but I think, this will give you a good idea on the things you can do with Emacs. All in all , I think choosing to use emacs (despite the learning curve) has been the most productive decision I have ever made.
Hope it helps.
I'd say the actual vim/emacs editors are far superior to the Eclipse text editor in terms of the shortcuts they offer. However, I completely agree with you about refactoring.
Most people have to write scripts to do the sort of level of refactoring Eclipse is capable of. I think part of it is bragging rights or people just doing it the same way they always have.
We've had this argument at work recently. My take was that one single feature I couldn't do without is Emacs's autocomplete. Eclipse's autocomplete is based on syntactical analysis - the code gets parsed, and as you type code you're offered choice of completion. Emacs' autocomplete is base on simple textual analysis. That means it works in plain text, in comments, in documentation - everywhere. I keep saying the Emacs' autocomplete is what IntelliSense wants to be when it grows up.
Update:
Eclipse does offer Alt-/ which is supposed to be similar to Emacs. Not sure how well it works, though.
The only place I prefer an IDE is for debugging. I set up my vim environment for debugging but is was so painful to use, so clunky, that I now just switch to my IDE (Netbeans) when I need to debug. vim is great for text editing, the IDE is great for more complex stuff (like debugging, and some project management related tasks).
Like some of the posts above, I started out with an IDE (Eclipse). From there I moved to Emacs, and then I moved back to a rich text-editor (TextMate).
For me, the efficiency was the ability to have an editor at the interface level. Allowing me to integrate other service I've built up (or others) into my pseudo-IDE environment.
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As some of you might know I am the lead developer of Padre, The Perl IDE. In the first year of its development, Padre became an acceptable text editor with some extra features for Perl development.
I'd like to ask the Stack Overflow community for some help in driving the project further to turn it into an exceptional IDE for Perl development. So I'd be glad to read what do you think are the most important features of an IDE that are still missing from Padre?.
Especially I'd be interested in people who currently use Eclipse+EPIC, Komodo, Visual Studio, or any of the text editors for programmers.
The most important feature of an IDE for Perl development (including Padre) is:
an interactive debugger that actually works. E.g. remembering breakpoints, ability to drill down into complicated data structures, and copy (to clipboard) should work on watched variables - including a menu command Copy Special that allows putting it in various formats; say CSV, XML or tab-separated.
The two most invaluable features I find:
line-by-line debugging, watchpoints, breakpoints, and so on, so I can properly debug my code.
code completion so I don't have to go looking up docs (even online).
OK, here's my third answer, although I hate to say it.
The competition is pretty easy to install. Padre isn't. I tried to update to the latest release today and, once again, got failing tests.
I am a heavy Perl EPIC user and my biggest gripe is not being able to jump to a function that is clearly defined in the current context (usually by pressing F3). It is pretty
much hit or miss at this point.
Stability. People turn away quickly if their editor crashes and they lose their work.
I work with Komodo. I also use other editors but I come back to Komodo most of the time. A good IDE shoud have:
A good Debugger. Breakpoints, watch lists, everything you need.
Remote debugging. Threads debugging capability.
Syntax highlighting including weighted fonts as well ( I was pretty disappointed by Oxygen, for example, an XSLT IDE, where I can not use bold fonts to emphasize reserved terms)
Syntax completion.
Project management tools, preferable extendable by plugins.
Good VCS integration. This is something that I absolutely love in Eclipse: You instantly see what files have local changes and which aren't added to the repository yet. And you get to browse the different versions and have a nice diff view just one mouse click away.
A project manager. It's essential for me to be able to define the set of files and folders that comprise a particular codebase. Sessions are useful but not a replacement.
Testing integration.
Perl has great unit testing tools. When I run my test suite and get a failure, I want to see the code for the test that failed.
Having a good way to jump through test results and see the code for the failed test along with the expected and actual results would be a great boon.
The first thing I look for is some kind of overview of the currently active file. I'd like to see methods/functions and, if possible, the used modules and especially any use base statements.
You solved that pretty well in Padre.
Visual-Studio style refactoring for variables and function names and extraction of functions.
Visual studio searches your whole module for all references and allows you to see all changed lines in case you do not want to change one instance (for whatever reason)...
The question seems more debatable than answerable.
Risking myself of being accused copyright abuser, I will post contents that I remember from the book "Interactive programming environments" by David R. Barstow, Howard E. Shrobe, Erik Sandewall.
It will not be exactly the same, as I have read the book many years ago and I've jotted down it in another language.
PRINCIPLES OF A GOOD INTERACTIVE PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT
1: Know the user
+ Know the previous knowledge and practice of the user
2: Minimize the memorization
+ Selection and not characters entering
+ Names and not numbers
+ Predictable behavior: the user should have a previous impression of what the system will do
+ Possible access and changing of the parameters of the system
3: Optimization of operations
+ Fast execution of common operations
+ Inertia of visualization: the screen should change the less possible
+ Memorization of system operation in user's memory
+ The meaning of specific operations should have a simple relationship with the state of the system
+ The system must be prepared to accept more than 10 followed commands per second, so that it can operate on the user's muscular memory
+ The system should be prepared to organize the parameters of a command
4: Engineer for the errors
+ Provide good error messages.
+ Engineer it to remove away the common errors.
+ The system should provide reversible actions.
+ Redundancy: the operations should have more than one way of being done.
+ Integrity of data structures.
The ability to configure and run external (command-line) tools. Plug-ins are great but end-users won't necessarily want to author one just to integrate with an external tool. Allowing users to configure their own tools provides a great deal of extensibility with minimal barriers to entry.
My editor of choice is UltraEdit. It's not an IDE, but through its support for user tools, I've been able to integrate IDE features such as lint, version control, debugging, and more.
This can be possibly achieved via use strict; but could be as well a valuable feature even if not use'd explicitly, namely:
the other day we spent about 10-20 minutes debugging the following behavior:
my %hash;
$hash->{'key1'} = value1;
# on reading in a different module
print $hash{'key1'}; # is, of course, empty, but was so easy to overlook in the code above
resume:
proper Perl type safety brought in by the IDE.
It might be already implemented in Padre, though, as it turned out not in Eclipse+EPIC
I use emacs. I would like a system that helps me refactor code, especially when I'm working on ugly 1999 code that uses the begin-at-the-beginning-go-to-the-end philosophy combined with duplicate-and-modify.
I looked at Eclipse, but I can't work with a system that requires me to create a project before I can make a one-character correction to a file.
I looked at Padre, but it's slow and crashes.
I looked at Kod which claims to be configured by CSS, but I can't find a man page that will tell me where to put the CSS.
Integration of a read-eval-print loop. As a heavy Emacs user, I very much appreciate Sepia. Very useful for trying things out before I commit them to code.
Ability to create and debug XS code.
The ability to use my own choice of editor (which it may have, as far as I know). That has a chance of winning over the vim/emacs people.
I don't know if Padre can do this, but the ability to split the screen is very important to me. As a VIM user, I constantly split my screen to look at another file while coding.
Line ending policies for files, by directory, and project-wide.
So, for a given project or directory, I'd like to make all line endings be LF only. While in another directory I may wish to have a mix of CRLF and LF files.
I work a lot on stuff that goes back and forth between Unix and Win32 environments.
The typical solution of automatically converting all files back and forth as one moves from platform to platform hasn't worked well for me.
When a file gets created in the wrong format by accident, it can be a real pain.
I am relatively new in a software development. I have noticed that in some cases a text editor with extended text processing capabilities (I use Notepad++) gives me a better productivity than an IDE (I use the Eclipse and the Netbeans). In the era of IDEs, does it makes sense to learn emacs (or some other tool that you suggest?)
Yes, and no.
Yes for the exact same reason why a doctor should be able to get an approximate diagnose from your symptoms by using his experience, and not putting the list of symptoms in a google query and find the answer.
Yes for the exact same reason why airliner pilots are taught to fly without fly-by-wire even if all airplanes are today fly-by-wire, so almost everybody is able to keep them flying.
No, because if you need specific tools to make your life easier, such as GUI designers, Intellisense, access to documentation, then clearly Emacs is not enough.
Still, I remember that many developers at Microsoft organized a fund raising for uganda vim children.
Summing up, you need to use what makes you more productive. In many cases, emacs (or vim) is more productive than a huge IDE that makes coffee.
Even if you were using an IDE, it's still useful to know Emacs/VIM. You don't have your IDE around all the time, and while doing something via SSH, you don't really have any other option (yeah you can use nano, but thats not very effective).
When you do software development, you often deal with a lot of text besides code. I may use an IDE for most of my coding, but often I'll use Vim for plain ol' text viewing and manipulation.
Sometimes I need to view code, SQL scripts, XML, CSV, or TXT files. Other times I may want to perform bulk replacements on those files, or extract out certain chunks of text from it.
IDEs are good for writing and refactoring code, but aren't meant to be used for generic text viewing and manipulation. For that, I'd recommend having the full power of something like Emacs or Vim. Notepad++ can be good too.
In short, use the right tool for the job.
Everyone here seems to think that Emacs/Vim are light-weight compared to IDE's. This couldn't be further from the truth. Even the best IDE's do not have the features that Emacs does. In what IDE's can you program completely without moving your hands from the keyboard, read your email, chat with Jabber, run an integrated debugger, view your calendar, program your own functions, and send dbus commands? That's only the surface of what Emacs allows; I'm sure Vim has similar capabilities.
Ignoring productivity completely; remember why you started programming in the first place. You like to create stuff, you like to know how stuff works, you like creating clever solutions to obscure problems, you like tinkering, you like learning new things, you like creating tools that help you do things.
With this in mind the answer is yes, learn it if you think it will add to the delight to your days. Maybe you will also get some work done along the way. Fiddling with eamcs will not make you melt. You might even make a life-long friend of it. Happy Hacking.
Emacs is an IDE. In fact, you could argue it's a whole operating system.
vi, on the other hand, is an editor.
Yes, it makes sense to learn vi, since it's about the only editor you can use on anything vaguely posix, even if the GUI isn't running or the network is incredibly slow (vi is usable at 300 baud). Basically, it's the unix administrator's safety net of an editor. I've used it to rescue myself from broken device drivers on an OS X server that would only come up so far as single user, so even the must GUIfied Unix out there can still be saved by humble vi.
It makes some sense to learn emacs too, but perhaps not quite so much these days.
I would say it helps to learn emacs (or say vim).
Personally I'm comfortable using IDE (eclipse) for Java developement, when I code in perl or python I prefer to use emacs. Also if you are in a resource constriant environment (say) starting an IDE like Eclipse (which would crawl if there is anything less than 1GB RAM) to write a perl script might not be feasible. In such cases a vim would be neat tool of choice.
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I'm currently working on a Perl web app LAMP style and recently stumbled upon this death maze of code left by some previous developer. He left so many magic numbers and weird logic that it gives me a headache every time I had to go through it.
I'm learning unit testing right now so I want to find some useful tool to refactor the code and write unit test along the way to make sure that I don't accidentally break anything.
Any recommendation for any good refactoring tool for Perl?
Preferably free :)
I think Eclipse / EPIC has "some" Perl refactoring tools... but don't quote me on that ;-)
Might also be worth checking out Komodo. However the full version isn't free like Eclipse / EPIC. You could try their opensource version Komodo Edit but I guess it won't have all the features?
I've not used either above or any other refactoring tools... I get by with vi/vim & TextMate editors and what they provide (or what I've so far found in each of these editors!).
Making unit tests is a good start. Also have a look perltidy / Perl::Tidy & Perl::Critic which may help peer thru the mess and find some of those "code smells".
Probably, volunteers on Refactor :my => 'code' can help you. Anyway, it's free to ask :)
Perl's dynamic nature means that it is very hard to create refactoring tools for it.
However with regards to testing you should be able to put together some regression tests to help you on your way. This works by starting with the code as it is now and capturing its current output. This might be running the CGI script from the commandline and saving the resultant HTML to file.
Once you've captured this you can change the code and as you go check to see that the HTML has not changed, which means that the code has not broken. When changes do occur you can then either find the bug, or change the test to accept the new HTML as correct.
This can be a bit of a chore to set up but will make your life easier in the long run. You should try to automate these tests to make the easy to run. Checkout Test::WWW::Mechanize and Test::LongString as well as all the others.
While it's not really refactoring in any great depth, this PerlMonks node describes a couple of Vim mappings for deobfuscating perl code using B::Deparse.
Their examples:
You can type _d when your cursor is over this line in normal mode:
--$|&&s|\n|-|;
... and it will be replaced with:
s/\n/-/ if --$|;
And this line:
$foo and $bar or $baz = 1;
... would be replaced with:
$baz = 1 unless $foo and $bar;
Eclipse with the EPIC plug-in does have some refactoring support. Not as sophisticated as IntelliJ's refactoring for Java tool. Not 100% sure it would help with your problem though. They way I've used it is to highlight blocks of code and move them into functions / methods. In your case you're probably going to want to do a lot of search/replace on those magic numbers...
I assume you're going to use Test::More to write your unit tests. Some of the other EPIC tools could help with that (eg "todo" tags).
You could also use Test::WWW::Mechanize and Test::WWW::Selenium -- would be useful in your case to have selenium tests defined to make sure you don't break any end-user functionality. EPIC doesn't have anything in particular to help with that though but it should be possible to use it to step-through the code when debugging.
Good luck. :-)
See Devel::Refactor - Perl extension for refactoring Perl code.
https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::Refactor
vim! (Or any other text editor)
There really isn't a magic tool to refractor your code, there is tools around to (for example) rename variables/functions, but there is no way it can magically fix horrible code structure or weird logic.
Padre has some refactoring tools.
Renaming of variables works pretty good for a while (two years or so) now.
http://padre.perlide.org/
Disclaimer: I am a Padre contributor.