Hacker News Reader

Is the IDE required? For me, a command line tool (compiler?) would suffice.

It looks like gcc can be used (http://mspgcc.sourceforge.net/). I'll have to brush up on my C.

Same here, but I expect at least C code for those little chips will remain manageable in size.

Also llvm ( http://www.llvm.org ) has experimental msp430 backend.

Once compiled, how does the transfer to chip go?

There should be some kind of utilities. So far I have at least used one for Atmel AVR-s and MIPS architectures.