I've been looking at a few IDE's for C++ Development, and I can seem to find one that suits, I tried Geany, Anjuta , Eclipse, and SlickEdit.
Slickedit is the best one by far, but I'm gonna geek out and see if I can get a decent development environment going with vi or emacs or nano, and the GNU toolchain.

1)
Configuring Nano:
Luckily my Ubuntu distro comes with text highlighting files for various programming languages. So all I have to do is include the one for C/C++ in my .nanorc file. This file may not exist so just create it with:

eamoc@knut:~$ nano ~/.nanorc

Then just add a reference to the appropriate file. Edit .nanorc to include:

include /usr/share/nano/c.nanorc

Then add the following to allow multiple files open at once:

set multibuffer

Now you can switch between files on the buffer by doing "Alt >" or "Alt <"


2)
Install the compilers:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

3)
Install the debugger and documentation

sudo apt-get install gdb gdb-doc

The documentation can be viewed at:

file:///usr/share/doc/gdb-doc/html/gdb/index.html
Debugger internal documentation can be viewed at:

file:///usr/share/doc/gdb-doc/html/gdbint/index.html

4)
Install the GTK library for developing gui based programs

sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev


To make sure the C compiler (gcc) is installed, do a whereis, and a which if you like



eamoc@knut:~$ whereis cc
cc: /usr/bin/cc /usr/bin/X11/cc /usr/share/man/man1/cc.1.gz

eamoc@knut:~$ which cc
/usr/bin/cc



So to compile and run a simple c program,

Fire up nano and load a new file and paste in a simple helloworld example.

nano -wc helloworld.c

-w disables word wrapping
-c displays the cursor position

Compile:
cc helloworld.c

Then to run it, go:
./a.out

even better:
cc -o helloworld helloworld.c

Then you can do:
./helloworld

A future post will detail, the bare bones of a development environment which will include bash scripts that will generate project/make files and directories etc.