cough*SciTE*cough

If you're going to teach people about programming, please teach them what a compiler is and how it works. We don't need more people who believe in the magical power of the IDE ...

SciTE is a text editor with some programming helpers, such as syntax highlighting for a whole bunch of languages, automatic indenting, code folding, intellisense, and such. If you have a makefile, compiling is just one press of F11 away.

SciTE sadly has no project support, something I'd much like to see myself, but it does have multi-file support. Files are easily accessible through a tab bar.

Programmers don't want to reinvent the wheel and duplicate effort ... if there's one good, free editor, why make another when you can just contribute to that one?

Relo is a pretty nice IDE.
SciTe is a pretty nice texteditor.

If you want an IDE, use RELO. It comes with allegro support (even has a built-in allegro project) and gives you API help inside the editor.

For all your other textfile needs - SciTE will get the job done.

The class browser in Dev-C++ is admittedly buggy. Fortunately, I don't tend to use this feature when coding (I use CTRL-F instead).

I have found Dev-C++'s built in GDB debugger support to be quite good. If you intend to use the debugger, you will need to rebuild your project and libraries with debug information. From there, its just a matter of setting break points and highlighting variables to see their values. The debugger doesn't seem to work well with STL containers and it bloats executable and library size to astronomical levels (33+ megs for my current project!!!). Beyond these issues, the debugger works quite well and I have no complaints. You might want to google for a tutorial on GDB and/or the Dev-C++ debugger so that they cease to be such a mystery.

I tend to use Dev-C++ for all my C++ coding and Eclipse for Java/Python/Lua. Eclipse also supports GCC, so it might not be a bad all around generic IDE to look at.

The things I really like about Dev-C++ are project templates and the fact that it is highly customizable (I tend to use a really strange code coloring scheme). I also like the built in CVS support and the ability to add personal help menus.

I've tried Relo and don't really care for it, but this may be because I'm so used to Dev-C++. That said, you should definately give Spellcaster's "Easy Allegro" a close look. It might be what you're after. I'll stick with Dev-C++ though:)

To be fair Microsoft didn't make the first IDE in the world ... but like I said, if this is for a course, you should teach people about the compiler and how things actually work; that's part of the point IMO.

In Visual C++ 6, I setup my libs once, and press 1 button to compile, and run. Plus I can place breakpoints on any line of code, and step through line by line (very very helpful). Are you a linux person? Linux people seem to be more inclined to use command line, than straight windows people.

Maybe you're the only one writing bug-free code?

Then how do you debug? I find annoying having to add printf's all over the place. Breakpoints + line-by-line are useful when solving some kind of logic bugs (More than once these have helped me a lot in problems that would had took me much more time).

While I agree with you that starting with command line is a better learning exercise, when you're experienced using an IDE helps, specially with large projects.

I agree fully. But these are not experienced people, there are noobs, and they need to be taught how things work first of all, then they can advance to using tools to make things faster.

Ashteth, has a point. You have to have a nice balance. I don't know much about compilers, but I can still program. Alot of people might quit to soon if you slam them with certain topics. Teaching well is probably the hardest thing to do.

I guess that includes most people in first year CE. Here java is teached, using command line to compile, in linux, and with emacs as the editor. It seems to give pretty good results.

[edit]
Then they teach c++, now in a Solaris computer. Again no IDE. But now you pick between emacs or vi. Lately they installed nedit, but I still prefered to use emacs.