What is Your C Development Environment like?

first off needs

libstdc++.so.6 or something similar

on windows its in visual studio 2008, mac its xcode 4.x

other than that stuff i don't worry too much about detail and focus on making great programs that make me $

I usually use vim+screen+make(gdb, gcc...). Plus a really hairy .screenrc that does some magic to put running command lines in the status line (so i can see which screen has vim foo.c running). But the key is to not have 10+ files open at once. You're using vim so opening and closing vim instances is no big deal. I usually only have two or three source files open at a time that way i know exactly where each one is. This limits my screen tabs to only 4-5 which is pretty manageable.

I usually have a konsole open ready to run make; and two kwrite windows open, side by side. Sometimes also a konqueror window open to the directory containing the source code I'm working on at the time.

As lukesandberg points out, there's no reason to have 10+ files open at once. Work on one thing at once and only open up files when you're working on them or need to check something (e.g., "what order did I put the parameters to that function").

I use Emacs with all of the ido stuff. Even with dozens of buffers open, I can just hit C-x b and then a couple of characters in the name of the buffer I want. I don't even have to use consecutive character; 'fb' would work to match 'foobar.txt'.

You can have a shell in an Emacs buffer, but I could never really get used to that. Instead, I use Tilda to have a Quake-style console that I can show or hide as I need.

I don't do much C myself but I use Vim all the time so maybe I can give you a few useful hints:

- learn to open files from Vim with :e and tab completion

- learn to use buffers effectively, the :b command with tab completion is particularly useful to switch between buffers

- CRTL-0 / CTRL-I to go back and forth between cursor positions

- for C/C++, a.vim is a plugin that allows you to switch quickly between header and implementation

- learn to use make from Vim with :make, it will take you to the first compilation error and open a quickfix window that you can use to go to other errors (can be configured to compile other languages than C/C++)

- try ack, a better grep, very useful to search source code, there's a Vim plugin to integrate it

- if you have a lot of files and directories in your project, try the Command-T plugin

- for git, the Fugitive plugin can also be helpful (screencasts at http://vimcasts.org/)

A random guess at the real problem: you have not found a way to efficiently navigate multi-file projects, and thus end up opening tons of tabs. I was going to recommend ctags, but apparently you've already found it (you know about the extremely useful Ctrl-], Ctrl-t?); I've heard people recommend cscope (although I wouldn't run it on untrusted source code), and I'm sure there are other options. If this is indeed the real issue, try to fix that first.

This is exactly why I find using an IDE (MSCV / XCode) so attractive when working in C or C++, I'm sure others would agree too. It makes you lazy (ignorant?) about makefiles and the build process unfortunately, but increases productivity for me when I can easily view the whole project in terms of files OR classes/code constructs.

I'm also a fan of TextWrangler on the Mac for its basic file sidebar for quickly switching, but its still a bit tougher on big projects, having only a "flat" view of your files.

snavigator+vim