You don't have to be an admin to run emacs on Windows:
To install Emacs, simply unpack the binary package into a directory
of your choice. To complete the installation process, you can
optionally run the program addpm.exe in the bin subdirectory.
...
For instance, you can now run Emacs
directly from a CD or USB flash drive without copying or installing
anything on the machine itself.
I used Code::Blocks maybe 6 years ago. I agree with your assessment. It was so bad, it was the main reason I ditched Windows and switched to GNU/Linux + emacs. After Code::Blocks I thought that IDEs were best avoided. (Edit: For what it's worth, I didn't like Visual Studio any better, I should have used emacs + a Makefile all along.) More importantly, I found compiling OSS Unix software on Windows was just too painful. On any decent GNU/Linux distro everything is set up for you!
Installing Emacs is not the problem. Although I am on Ubuntu in my University, I can build from source. Its is setting everything up to my liking for a computer that I will only use a total of a dozen times that I don't want to do. Maybe I am too lazy :)
Hmm, not sure why I assumed Windows. Probably because at the time I switched away from Windows to the liberation of the Unix commandline I never even thought of checking whether Code::Blocks or Dev-C++ ran under GNU/Linux.
I have a custom .emacs file (predicated to work on Windows/Linux/Mac and several emacs versions and including a function to install all the custom packages I need) and other config files like .bashrc in a git repo fr quick setup. Having to compile emacs yourself would be hugely frustrating though. I've never gone that far. I use TRAMP instead :)
