for writing small programms like GNU Hello you really don't need Eclipse or
something big like that. One of the programmers on this forum mentioned Geany
once, I've been using it since and totally happy about it. It uses GCC as a
backend and has three buttons: compile, build, execute. The compile button
creats an .o file, so called object code. It's the program you've written,
minus the libraries. Build links the libraries then and you get a nice
executable in the same folder. The button execute runs that last file in a
small terminal-like window.
In a nutshell, Geany rocks. It has auto completition if you try to use some
class attributes or methods defined earlier. It also recognizes all the
classes you made and shows them in a neat hierarchy on the left. The compiler
error messages are on the bottom. Geany starts up very fast, so I assume it
has a low memory footprint too (never checked that, got 2GB of RAM).
In order to start using Geany properly, you need the GCC to be installed. Try
this: sudo aptitude install gcc g++ geany.
AFAIK Eclipse has it strong side when it comes to projects that consist of
many different languages. I'm only an amateur programmer myself, so stuff
like that is beyond my comprehension. I work on C++ so far, nothing else.
