what is your favorite building system?

what make/ide do you use by choice and why?

If your make/ide allows you use a certain technique for structuring everything, what technique do you use and why?

bash - it was the default on my system and I've grown used to it. I use it for scripting simple and system specific things. I also use the GNU userland utilities.

GNU Make - generally I use only the most ``portable'' make features.

gcc - my regular compiler.

clang - another compiler that's nice (good to test code with more than one compiler)

vim - very handy editor. Not very good with it, though, compared to some.

git - simple and effective version control.

racket - mostly for SICP exercises but also for some small programs.

qmake - I use at work. Quite okay.

Why not use an IDE? The regular explanation: I want things to be quite explicit and have functionality divided among programs. Scripts are more portable, scalable and repeatable than IDEs.

make has always been enough for me, although I haven't had to deal with very large projects, so I'm not sure how nice it is at those levels (auto tools... ugh). But if you keep your programs small and specific you don't end up with one large project.