Well I agree that for Perl you don't get much benefits using a IDE or a very fancy editor, but when you start thinking that OTRS is not just a bunch of Perl code, but also JS, HTML, XML, YAML, CSS, etc. You maybe start thinking that a tool to cover them all should be a good idea, with some syntax highlight and ctrl space suggestions. Then you maybe want to track bugs in your developments or in OTRS, and also you maybe want to use a versioning system like CVS GIT or SVN, and you are at this point (mostly on a Windows machine) with a full set of tools to help you on each of this tasks, or you can do it with a simple notepad ;-) for sure. Yeah. I find the Perl mode in Emacs to be quite helpful (the defaults are well-chosen), but that's a) a religious preference, based on, b) 30 years of living in Emacs, and c) not a technical requirement. There are Emacs modes for all those fancy things - syntax highlighting and all that jazz - YMMV. I'd probably also encourage people to do OTRS development on Linux instead of Windows, but that's also a religious issue. It can be done. You'll spend most of your time trying to find good productivity tooling, but if you want to do it on Windows, you can. Working with VMs is good, but slow and not so much resource efficient (but for sure better than Windows IMHO) The main benefit for having a copy of OTRS running in a VM for developers is that you can stop, start, change settings, and break it without bothering anyone else. You can try things (like upgrades) without risking anything important, and run with all debugging turned on (which would make a production instance pretty much unusable, but is invaluable in development). It's worth it's weight in gold, especially if you run your production OTRS in a VM - being able to take a snapshot of the running production system and use that as your development base is really, really handy.