use Perl

Though I don't use padre myself, reading your post mention 'recursive find and replace' made me think .. would it be possible to integrate ack with padre in a simple plugin? http://search.cpan.org/~petdance/ack/ more horsepower available than anything you'd write yourself, since most of the work is already done. I'm not exactly sure what feature set you're looking for but ack might fit the bill.