I'm by no means an expert on this, but here are a couple of pointers from things I've heard of. I hope others can offer more.

Earl Brannigan earl.brannigan@lindenhouse.co.uk writes:

Or better still (begin lazy Win user hopeful smile) is there an IDE out there for X which sits on top of GCC and takes care of at least some of the nitty gritty?

For X, http://sources.redhat.com/sourcenav/ For console, http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~sho/rho/rhide-1.4/rhide-linux.html

Or you could just learn (X)Emacs...

I've looked at the section on Front-ends at www.gnu.org but couldn't see

You almost certainly don't want those just yet.