What is the best C IDE on Linux?

[kragen at pobox.com]

"Bob Drzyzgula" <bob at drzyzgula.org> writes:
> In my personal experience, the whole vi-vs-emacs thing really comes down to
> what people do with computers. In particular, almost all emacs fans that I
> know log into a single computer, start up emacs, and just sit there and work
> on that same computer for weeks on end until there's a power hit or for some
> other reason the computer has to be rebooted. 

And if they use save-session, they may not even lose any state in the
process --- restoring their emacs state is just part of rebooting and
logging back in.  I have a friend whose emacs always includes hundreds
of buffers because it's been running "continuously" in this fashion
for several years.

> If they use emacs to edit their email, then they pretty much have to
> handle the email *within* emacs, because even the idea of starting
> up another copy of emacs just to edit a single file is far too
> painful to contemplate.

This was actually why I learned to use vi --- on a Sparc 5 with Emacs
NFS-mounted so it took 30 seconds to start.  On modern machines,
though, gnuclient or emacsclient is fast enough.

> In fact, it is virtually impossible to be a Solaris
> systems programmer or administrator without at least coming to terms with
> vi; Sun still doesn't ship emacs as part of the base OS distribution, and
> didn't even start distributing it "copackaged" with the OS until Solaris 8.

How relevant this is depends on how often you use Solaris machines you
haven't yet installed Emacs on.  ;)

> Even when dealing with machines that are largely functional, when your job
> involves logging into two dozen machines in a single day to perform various
> administrative duties the overhead of starting up emacs at each login is
> just not worth it.

Well, most Unix machines are administered by editing files and running
shell commands; if you have efs working, you can avoid the hassle of
starting editors on each machine and just edit all your files in the
same Emacs session.  FWIW, I don't know any Unix admins who actually
*do* this.