Integrated development environment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Many Linux programmers argue that the existing command-line GNU tools are in themselves an IDE, though with a different style of interface and under the Linux environment, many programmers still use makefiles and their derivatives. But even on Linux, graphical IDEs are becoming increasingly popular, although almost all of them are built on top of the text-based utilities (which makes them more compatible with each other somehow). Linux programs that use the standard GNU tools are easily ported to other operating systems, including Windows and Mac OS X, because most of these tools have been ported, using Cygwin or some other method like MinGW on Windows. Similarly, many Linux programmers use Emacs or Vim (an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the Unix editor Vi), which integrates support for many of the standard Unix/Linux build tools in what its users believe is an extremely elegant manner. Data Display Debugger is intended to be an advanced graphical front-end for many text-based debugger standard tools, even if Emacs itself has many plug-ins for debugging.

Under Windows, command-line tools for development are not well known, probably because Windows emphasises a graphical approach. As a result, there are multiple commercial and non-commercial solutions, but each of them has a different design and as a result they tend to have compatibility problems. That said, all the major compiler vendors for Windows provide free copies of their command-line tools, including Microsoft (Visual C++ free version, Platform SDK, Microsoft .NET Framework SDK, nmake utility), Borland (bcc32 compiler, make utility), and GNU (gcc, gdb, GNU make).

IDEs have always been popular on the Mac, going back to Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, Turbo Pascal and THINK C environments in the mid-1980s.