With Xcode 3 (version 4 is sadly mostly single-window), I can have 2 or more full-height (50 lines) windows of code visible at once, even on my 15" notebook display.

Have you tried View->Hide Toolbar and View->Hide Tabbar in Xcode 4?

Then maybe "Use separate window" on double click navigation in general preferences to emulate the XCode 3 windowing behaviour.

For any platform, I usually chose the environment that is provided by the developer of the platform if available.

That usually coincides with having the best tools

So that would be VS for windows, and XCode for OSX

I prefer Eclipse CDT for writing code because it has refactor tools built-in and can generate getters and setters stubs for classes. In Visual Studio you have to buy lame expensive add-ons.

But yeah, Visual Studio's debugger is by far the best one and just for that I'll use it instead of Eclipse. I also really like its unit testing framework for C++.

Visual Studio is perfectly capable of doing the "maximize real-estate for code" thing; in fact it's probably the best for that and I've never seen anything with comparable functionality when it comes to both hiding stuff when it's not needed and showing stuff when it is needed (both of which are important). All the little pop-up dialogs and panels can be tucked away, they will come back when you mouse over them, auto-hide again when you mouse out, and automatically appear when you do something that requires them to be visible (so the "Output" panel can be hidden until you do a build, at which point it will automatically appear).

You should try Vim. Nothing comes close. You can have multiple windows open split exactly how you like them. Most of the time I have about 6 or 7 source files open at any one time and have a nice project display on the left. Plus it has auto code completion and automatic code checking via clang. I haven't found anything anywhere near as powerful on any platform.

I use QtCreator.

It's well designed, stable, and has good intellisense, syntax highlighting, project management, built-in GUI WYSIWYG editor, is multi-pane-able, built-in debugger support (GDB - though GDB has bugged out on me), built-in source-control support for a dozen source-control tools, and is cross-platform.

The reason I don't use Visual Studio (and never have, so I can't compare it) is because I'm developing for cross-platform, and I want a cross-platform IDE to reduce my confusion. QtCreator seems to be the best non-VisualStudio IDE I've found.

It can be used with and without the Qt GUI api, so don't let the name fool you.

I did try several IDE's.

Eclipse was ok, but I didn't like it for C++

I liked Code::Blocks and CodeLite a lot, they are quite similar in functionality

Anjuita / KDevelop are too clunky for me

VisualStudio I only use for C# / .NET, also heavy modified on the colours ;)

Since a few months I only use VIM and the command line for C++ development. It has a steep learning curve, but I really like it.

I actually hardly miss the code completion (there is some basic support for it in the plugins I currently use, but not as efficient as VisualStudio). I can easily find the needed functions in the documentation of the different libraries or in the header files. Most IDE's won't show the needed documentation anyways (at least not when I looked last, which is some years ago :P)

With Xcode 3 (version 4 is sadly mostly single-window), I can have 2 or more full-height (50 lines) windows of code visible at once, even on my 15" notebook display.

Have you tried View->Hide Toolbar and View->Hide Tabbar in Xcode 4?

Then maybe "Use separate window" on double click navigation in general preferences to emulate the XCode 3 windowing behaviour.

I've tried that (in fact it is my current setting), the issue is that it doesn't remember window positions or sizes, causing me to have to manually resize the window each time I open one. I spent about a week messing with Xcode 4 trying to get it to my liking but was mostly disappointed, to the point where I re-installed Xcode 3 side-by-side so that I can use both. Other issues include not being able to compile a single file at a time (background compilation doesn't cut it). There are some good parts of Xcode 4 (I like project settings and integrated Interface Builder), but it seems like they tried to stuff as much functionality as possible within a single window interface without thinking about workflow or usability.

Visual Studio is the best IDE I've used and what I prefer. Code Warrior and ProDG are the worst. Xcode also sucks, but not as much as those two.

Visual Studio has by far the best debugger. The GDB-integration in QtCreator is pretty good. And when really just tryin something quickly (single .c or .cpp) I use SciTE.