Is there a way to make it work with just make? I'm way too used to just typing make at this point and it's not too much work to just copy the same makefile everywhere.
Use a phony target that does whatever you want. Mine typically invoke cc to build the program ("cc -O3 -Wall -o main main.c", something like that?), then run the program ("./main"), which prints its stuff to stdout and stderr. Makes it very easy to build+run from within Emacs, where the default compile command is "make".
echo "all: main" > Makefile
make
No need create a Makefile.
make main
is enough.
Indeed, but it doesn't quite answer how to make it work with _just_ `make`