I'm not saying they should ignore IDEs entirely. But by teaching everything in the context of IDEs is limiting, it hides a lot of things that students don't even know exist. I went through 5+ years of education without knowing what e.g. the classpath is. Guess how much fun it was to fix classpath issues for the first time. One single lesson outside the IDE would have filled this gap.

> instead of just telling them to use the tools you can teach students how to use them well

Yes, that would be great. If only I'd ever met a teacher able and motivated enough to do that. Coincidentally, it's easier to teach about how to run a couple CLI commands and read the documentation than explaining a behemoth including everything from version control to debuggers that's all thrown in your face at once.

> One single lesson outside the IDE would have filled this gap.

Hmm, what would the lesson look like? I doubt there is a way to teach everything about out-of-IDE/advanced Java development in just a single hour or two. You mentioned CLASSPATH, but there are also JARs with manifest files, there are multitude of build systems with their own configuration languages/plugins/conventions, there are ClassLoaders, there are Java Compiler Plugins... Just too much.

You either list terms for two hours straight without any details and exercises or you choose some semi-random subset of topics, which may very well not include CLASSPATH for some reason. Alternatively, you teach for ten hours instead of two.

>and read the documentation

This part stays intact either way though. You're not wrong that teaching students to run a couple of CLI commands is easier, but they still need to understand what they're doing, otherwise it can be just about as opaque as clicking a button in a graphical program.

Considering the vast majority of them will be using IDEs if they are coding in Java professionally, personally I feel it is worth taking some extra time to at least give them a starting-off point and then letting them access the documentation that the IDEs themselves provide. Whether this comes after teaching them the basics of the language through the barebones text editor + CLI tools approach or is what they are taught from the ground up is a matter of choice.