building ubuntu apps

[Rene Veerman]

Hi,

i'm getting a bit tired with nautilus' 90's-style quirks.

so i'd like to know what a good ubuntu dev environment looks like.

min req: a tree class that's as much as win7's win-explorer tree as
possible, and which can easily be extended.
i gotta be able to put a background on that tree-class, via extension
if need be.

i have some years of OOP exp in delphi (visual pascal on windows) and
l.a.m.p., aswell as a strong inclination towards easy-to-read code.