I think there's a bit of personal preference. As a student I hated IDEs, because I couldn't tell what was actually happening. To this day, I avoid using and IDE

I think there's a bit of personal preference. As a student I hated IDEs, because I couldn't tell what was actually happening. To this day, I avoid using and IDE or other tool for git/version control, because I can't tell what it is doing. There's more typing with a text editor and javac, but it's much simpler to understand IMHO. All of this must be understood in the context of first year programming. For my class, there were no libraries that one needed, and at most 10 or so java files to compile. The classpath would never need to be more than the working directory.