Vim is pretty much an IDE. I type :make (not :!make) to build. Vim gathers the errors into a quick-fix list, and navigates through them. I have Vim's :grep bound to doing lid lookups on a mkid-generated database: lightning fast to find all occurrences of an identifier. And of course tags for chasing identifier definitions, thanks to a ctags-generated database. Vim has very good syntax highlighting and indentation; many times I spot as syntax error because it is flagged by Vim. I also have a Vim add-on that performs code completion. I type foo. and the list of members of structure foo come up, etc.

I don't step-debug inside Vim; but it looks like there are ways:

http://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/2046/how-can-i-integra...