I spent a long time wrestling with trying to set up IDEs when I was learning. They were always a huge pain to set up, broke in confusing ways, and were generally far more effort than they were worth for the productivity gain (especially when I would try some other language/etc after a short period and go through it all again). Just using a text editor and the compiler was far easier to understand.

I still find some aspects of modern IDEs a pain, especially the fact that they either want to be your build system (and are generally crap at that) or lock you into a specific build system. Likewise I haven't found one IDE which can handle the variety of languages I use, so I need to learn 3, even if they all do basically the same thing.

I have some hope with the trend towards 'language servers' and also 'build-system servers' (though ATM cmake and Qtcreator are the only example I know of the latter), that this will change and you will be free to choose your combination of build system, development environment, and language with ease.