>>42My dev machines run Winblows 7 and 8. I really don't think this question is relevant though. I definitely don't think they are better or worse than anything else, I just want the OS to work and get out of my way. I wasted months years ago playing around with Linux, but I realized I wasn't interested enough in exactly what kernel my hardware was running. I just wanted to write programs, I wanted my hardware to work, and I wanted a stable API to talk to my hardware. Linux could never quite get those 2 last things right.
My programming computers never go online.
I use Qt Creator as an IDE (it invokes the VS Express compiler), although my recent stuff doesn't use the Qt library.
I really like the live coding environments that Emacs and Squeak Smalltalk provide, so I built a live coding environment of my own based on Lua, and I spend a lot of time in that. Lua has excellent introspection facilities which I use to bring up function definitions and modify them live.