My experience of Clipper is very limited so hopefully others will be able to supply you with more illuminating answers.
Anyway, you are right, there is no development environment. I have always edited prg's in a text editor or opened them up in Foxpro. I don't know if there are other development environments you can use.
The method you describe to create an EXE sounds about right.
I think you do need to recompile to see the effects of a change.
Hope this is of some help.

Kier