I have more and more run into the need to work in various development environments lately, mainly going back and forth between Windows coupled with Visual Studio and various flavors of Unix with GCC or MinGW coupled with various text editors. On the Windows side, things are great. I will admit complete and total bias when it comes to using Visual Studio with Visual Assist. Nothing beats that combination for developing a C++ application, hands down. On the Unix side, however, I have been searching for a way to simplify my workflow and remove the need to work so heavily through the command line. Sure, the command line is more powerful than any user-friendly GUI will be without a heavy amount of tweaking and menus, but 99.5% of the time I don't need the power of the command line, I want the ease of use speed of an IDE that will let me drag and drop things, press a button to compile, another button to run, and click in some breakpoints here and there.A few days ago, my prayers were seemingly answered in the form of SlickEdit. It very easily lets me set up to use my pre-existing makefiles to build everything, while also offering the ability to have my workspace visually set up, allowing me to navigate through files easily and debug my applications in a visual interface, rather than through GDB command line. I haven't had a chance to fully go through SlickEdit's feature set yet, but I can say that I have seen enough to recommend it if you find yourself in a similar situation. I don't normally outright advertise a product here, but for this one, I will. Go get it here. If you're one of those people who like to know all the ins and outs of your tools, pick up the book here.
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