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Emacs
Emacs is my text editor of choice. Due to its rich features and extensibility, it has often being referred to as an operating system! Well, I get almost all my work done from Emacs itself - editing code, compiling, debugging, preparing documentation and on and on. BTW, these web pages were also composed in Emacs!
GNU/Linux
It may not be the best operating system out there, but it's better than most proprietary alternatives available. I never had my work disrupted due to an OS failure. It also opens up access to a large repository of free software, especially tools necessary for programmers. In the past, I tried various flavors of GNU/Linux and finally settled down on Ubuntu.
GCC
I use GCC almost every day to compile my C/C++ programs. MingW, is the Windows port of GCC. In fact, MingW coupled with the Code::Blocks IDE is a very decent Visual C++ replacement.
Cygwin
The GNU/Linux like environment for Windows. I develop all my projects in GNU/Linux and later just recompile them in Cygwin to get a Windows binary. This has worked well even for pretty large projects.
Scripting languages
I use them for prototyping, gluing together C/C++ components and to provide user-level extensibility to large programs. My favorites in this section are Lisp (especially my personal dialect), Python and Lua.