Makefiles, and IDEs in general.

For quite a while, my only experience with C and C++ was through the Bloodshead dev C++ IDE. It's a nice little program, but it's not going to be updated any time soon, so I went looking for a new IDE.

Now, most IDEs these days need you to download and install the compiler separately. Why, I don't know. Dev C++ never had to do this, and it still worked fine. Even after faffing around with that, these compilers go on about needing some kind of 'makefile' when trying to compile a windows program, which leaves me clueless, as Dev C++ happily compiled anything I threw at it while quite ignorant of the things. I've no idea what I'm supposed to do to make this 'makefile' appear so some instruction as to what they are would be helpful. I'm trying to compile with the NetBeans and Eclipse IDE, if such information is necessary.

Also, another thing I've noticed about IDEs lately is they you can't make single files. Dev C++ quite happily let me make a quick .c file and compile it to test a piece of code, but in every other IDE you need to make a great huge project and put the file in that. Nothing major, just a little annoyance for me.

>>1

OP, you've just outlined all the same reasons why I *hate* IDEs with a burning passion. Especially Eclipse. You can't do shit unless you create a workspace, and project, and jump through all sorts of crazy fucking hoops.

This is why to this day, for personal projects I still code in kwrite or gvim and compile and debug from command line.