I find make, cmake, and the other stuff annoying also. For personal stuff I just use a build.sh file. For debugging I use gf2, which is a gdb frontend. Hopefully raddebugger gets ported to linux soon. One nice tool I like on linux for prototyping is the tiny c compiler, because it compiles 7x faster than gcc or clang. It is also much faster than the visual studio compiler. I remember trying to get the tiny c compiler to work on windows; it can compile things, but I couldn't get it to generate pdb files for debug info.