In this modern age, if you're not fully comfortable with Composer usage, it's my opinion that you're better off learning composer than playing with CodeIgniter.
Almost everything worth using is on packagist and available through Composer, and instead of finding and downloading a file, unpacking it, reading how to install it, etc., you just type one command in your terminal and 20 seconds later you're playing with code.
Even when I use CodeIgniter I'm installing it via the terminal, through a bash script I created. If you starting working in the terminal a bit more, you'd get the hang of it.
