Well, I don't think anybody is "shunning" IDEs just to be difficult; it's just really, really hard to describe something in the context of an IDE. For one thing, IDEs are (obviously) graphical, so you have to include a screenshot if you want to refer to something. Worse, IDEs change things around a lot (sometimes for no particular reason). Then of course, there are no standards in this area - in Java you have Eclipse and IntelliJ, so if you want to describe something in terms of an IDE you either pick both and double the explanations, or you pick one and freeze out the others... or you just do everything on the command-line which is unambiguous. And don't forget, eventually you're going to have to get out of the IDE comfort zone if you want to interface with a continuous integration system.