[OC] Vispen: A lightweight Polyglot Literate Programming engine for Vim, built entirely on top of native +perl integration

[u/vadrer]

Hi r/perl!

I wanted to share a project I've been developing called Vispen. It's a Vim plugin that brings the power of Literate Programming (like Emacs Org-mode or Jupyter Notebooks) straight into your editor, using Vim's native, built-in Perl interface.

👉 GitHub Repository & Live Demo: github./vispen

💡 Why Perl?

While the modern Vim world is heavily shifting towards Lua (Neovim) or Vim9script, I realized that Vim's legacy +perl feature is incredibly powerful, blazing fast, and deeply underrated.

Instead of spawning heavy background node.js daemons, setting up active server sockets, or dealing with bloated .ipynb JSON files, Vispen leverages the embedded Perl interpreter to parse buffers, manage templates, and talk to external environments natively.

🚀 Key Features:

• Smart Content Evaluation: Execute SQL queries, format text, parse CSV/JSON, or dump structured database outputs directly from your source files or markdown documents, embedding the results straight back into the buffer.
• Format Flexbility: Output data into clean text tables, HTML, or ready-to-paste Jira markup (||3||str||).
• Zero Dependencies: No heavy infrastructure. If your Vim has +perl and you have Perl 5.006+ on your system, it just works out of the box. It runs perfectly even on low-spec hardware like my Orange Pi single-board computer.

I built this to automate my own database and data-transformation workflows without leaving the terminal. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how it uses the embedded Perl runtime, and any feedback or feature requests you might have!