And then I noticed that this simply isn't how you work there*, and I threw everything out, spent a few days reading manuals, set up my shell (bash), set up a GVIM environment, learned the GCC/binutils toolchain, make and gdb and lived happily ever after.
I'd mostly agree, but the problem is also one of perception: we forget how difficult it was to become productive in any chose IDE (or other environment). I find IDE's (Visual Studio, NetBeans, Eclipse) amazingly cumbersome in so many ways.
As an old-time UNIX guy, I always use Emacs. But that has a pretty steep
and long learning curve, so I'm not sure I can recommend it to newcomers.
I'd second that; use Emacs as my primary editor on both Linux and on MSW (XP2,W2K).
I would disagree that it has a steep learning curve, but would say that because of the huge number of features it has a long learning curve. You can be productive within a short time, but if you want you can learn new features of it for years to come.
However -- don't expect all the features of Emacs to be available on drop-down menus, there is just too much functionality to find it there.
As I metioned, I've used GNU Emacs on MSW for years. And it's always worked well with Visual Studio until I "upgraded" to 2008; now it sometimes delays many seconds before refreshing files from disk. The main reason for editing in the VS window is the "Intellisense" code completion feature.
