It's good you supplied the link, as you've misrepresented its contents somewhat. What they are discouraging downloads of is the standalone compiler, because if you want to compile outside of an IDE, gradle is the better choice.
As alternatives they suggest their online REPL (to play and learn without installing anything), IntelliJ (unsurprisingly their favourite), gradle, or maven. The latter are about as fully-fledged build systems as you can imagine and are easily used with any editor.
I'm sure there will be gradle plug-ins available for VS.Code or Atom, or a gradle mode for emacs.
As alternatives they suggest their online REPL (to play and learn without installing anything), IntelliJ (unsurprisingly their favourite), gradle, or maven. The latter are about as fully-fledged build systems as you can imagine and are easily used with any editor.
I'm sure there will be gradle plug-ins available for VS.Code or Atom, or a gradle mode for emacs.