I'm the complete opposite of the OP. My intro CS courses were taught using Eclipse, and I am constantly using it (for lack of a better, free, option) at work. I am getting more and more fed up with the bloat in Eclipse. Running in a Linux environment results in hard-to-diagnose crashes fairly often, and the memory overhead is, quite frankly, unacceptable.
I would gladly move to something lightweight like the OP asked for. Most of the features in Eclipse aren't useful to people working on relatively small projects, and the features that are useful (code completion, refactoring, nice library integrations) could probably be deployed with much less overhead.