Question

I looked around the GNU emacs material and didn’t find anything helpful.

Does anyone know of a good tutorial for setting up emacs, to basically turn it into an IDE? I’m looking for interfacing with gcc/gdb/make, etc…

Answer 1

Like other answers mentioned, M-x compile, M-x gdb will get you going. While debugging, I’d also suggest gdb-many-windows-mode, which makes Emacs look a bit closer to IDE when debugging.

Besides that and to get closer to “IDE-like features”, you can look at:

• CEDET http://cedet.sourceforge.net/ for code completion and project support. Excellent tutorial at http://xtalk.msk.su/~ott/en/writings/emacs-devenv/EmacsCedet.html .
• If you don’t mind using non-free software, Xrefactory (http://www.xref.sk/xrefactory/main.html) is probably the best (well, the only) refactoring tool. The C version is free, the C++ is not.