I'm looking for an IDE that is relatively small. I want it to work well with fluxbox on debian. And it needs to have a debugger, or work with gdb (syntax highlighting, selecting breakpoints in the editor and all that.) I'd also like it to be keyboard friendly.

I've found the list of debuggers on wikipedia, and also a sticky in these forums. But those were only lists. They didn't specify the features very much. So I've been trying a few that seemed like they might have been what I'm looking for, at least at first.

So far, in the last few hours, I've tried gnat, vide, and anjuta. I couldn't figure out how to get gnat to use pkg-config, and I think I would have to set the library settings for each and every project manually, which would be painful. Vide was not keyboard friendly. You couldn't use the keyboard to access the menu, even though the menu items appeared to have mnumonics. And it kept moving the mouse randomly whenever you opened a new window. Anjuta seems to be designed for gnome. Every time I think I've figured it out, some semi-hidden setting that only works in gnome trips me up, and I have to hunt down that setting. And the tutorials I find online for beginners all assume that it works out of the box. It doesn't.

I could spend a few more hours and figure out how to work with gnat or anjuta, but in addition to having functionality problems, they are huge, each are several dozen megabytes, at least when you include dependencies.

So, does anyone have advice for a light, fast, debugger that works seemlessly in any WM (at least fluxbox), and has a debugger/works with gdb?

The lightest IDE I have come across so far is Geany.

It is entirely GTK (no KDE or GNOME dependence), has tabs, syntax highlighting, etc. I don't write much code really, but when I do, this is what I am using.

Unfortunately, I don't think it has debugger support, which seems like it would be a deal breaker for you. Maybe somebody else who has worked with it more than myself can chime in on that subject.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried geany. Not very keyboard friendly; you have to use the mouse to navigate the preferences. But more kb friendly than the other IDE's I've tried. Definitely does not have a debugging interface.