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.

Vim stores its configuration in ~/.vimrc. This file contains a list of commands. These commands are executed whenever vim starts. The following example enables syntax highlighting, sets tabs to four spaces width, and replaces all tabs by spaces. The autoindent option causes Vim to start the next line with the same indentation the previous line had.

syn on
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set expandtab
set autoindent

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

Note that commands must start with a tab character.