It's all-round horrible advice. Once you have developed an understanding of 'fundamental operations', such as code formatting and file operations — and, realistically, you will already have done so if you are doing any programming — the next step is to automate them so that they take no time or mental energy, leaving you to work on things that matter. IDEs help with that.

Incidentally, the reason the tabs vs. spaces debate has died down is the proliferation of autoformatting. It really doesn't matter once you don't have to spend your precious time manually aligning code.