If you're going to ask questions, do your homework first. Really.

Coming onto a developer (sub)forum asking "How do you develop things?" is like walking up to a race car driver and ask "How do you drive a car?".

Being a bit more specific would help. And comparing Google to asking here is comparing different things. To answer a broad question like the one posed by OP would take quite a while and most of the answers would be better served via a page dedicated to a specific sub-topic.

Asking here is to go for details and best practices that might be hard to filter out from a few hundred hits on Google. Or, to actually find that page amongst those hundred where you'd get all the info you need.

But, to answer OP's question:
I set up my own cross compiler toolchain environment. There's a thread about it here that I created. I use emacs to write my code, make to build it by using gcc to compile my C code.

I don't use MADDE or the SDK because I really don't see any reason for it.