How would you advice setting up an Dev Enviroment?

[MuteClown]

Windows and want to start development for Linux as well, also haiku when it reaches a level of maturity. That is why i am going to go with FPC seems the better choice because of its cross platform ability. The reason i don't feel like going the Lazarus route is because i wouldn't be using the LCL, and i don't really like the editor. I was told a good way for keeping cross platform projects easy for maintaining, it to just use what ever text editor and use something like CMake. I have never used CMake but from my research i don't think it full works with Pascal, but you can write custom commands or something.

On the topic of IDE i am jealous of the Mac users, since they got two really nice lightweight IDEs which seem to be Mac only =/
I suppose Lazarus will have the best environment for debugging? Thats one thing i don't like doing on Emacs.

EDIT: Both 32 and 64 bit as well, so just as cross compile for win/linux so again for 32/64. I have two machine one with Windows other with linux, and want to have a best as i can environment which can be implemented on both and ill just update the directories.

[JSoftware]

You don't have to be using the LCL when using Lazarus. I use it to develop very non-visual firmware for ARM processors

Those days I can't live without Lazarus. There are just so many nice and nifty features packed into it, and I wouldn't hesitate to call it the best IDE I know. I guess you could use some old version of Delphi to write code in, and just compile from the command line

But if you just want a pretty good text editor, then I can recommend Programmers Notepad 2. I very often use it for minor edits

[User137]

Lazarus is very lightweight IDE in the end, at least compared to Delphi. What "too much" is there that you wouldn't use? It is designed to fit also in purpose of making just console applications. There is just the component palette, which you can almost completely hide by making the palette window just show other menus. You could possibly even compile Lazarus so that none of them are showing, because they are "installed components" like any custom ones.

It's possible to code pascal with just Notepad, but you would miss features like code completion, debugging, fpc compiler settings and so on.

Another thing that possibly makes Lazarus seem heavier than it is, is the splash screen. Start Lazarus with parameter:
lazarus.exe --no-splash-screen
... and you will see that Lazarus starts up in a fraction of second.