This page lists some hints and tricks for setting up a development environment.

I suggest using Vim. It provides many features to edit text and syntax highlighting. On Debian-based systems, install vim-gnome to get the graphical interface gvim.

To get help on C functions like printf, install manpages-dev. Having it installed, one can issue man printf on the console to get the function's description.

To simplify building C (or other) projects, make can be used (or any derivative.) A simple make file would be:

program:
        gcc -o program -Wall -g -O1 program.c