While I'm certainly under no illusions that building software without an IDE is possible, I don't actually know much about doing it well. I've been using graphical tools like Visual Studio or Code::Blocks so long that I'm pretty well lost without them.

And that really stinks when I want to change environments or languages. I couldn't really do anything in D until someone made a Visual Studio plugin, and now that I'm trying to do more development on Mac, I can't use D again because the XCode plugins don't work.

I'm sick of being lost when I see a .make file and having no idea what I'm supposed to do with a folder full of source files. People can't be compiling them one by one using the console and then linking them one by one. You'd spend more time typing file names than code. So what are the automation and productivity tools of the non-IDE user? How do you manage a project when you're writing all the code in emacs or vim or nano or whatever?

I would love it if there was a book or a guide online that spells some of this out.