In your experience, what are the best lightweight IED's that you would recommend?

Question

I have used visual studio on my desktop, however at 9GB, it's a bit big and clunky.

Answer 1

It depends on the language you want to use, but I used Code Blocks, Sublime Text, Dev C++, Eclipse and they are fine.
If you want to make Visual Studio faster, try to disable some functions and unecessary futures, packages, animations etc., it helped me a lot and now it's my favourite IDE.

Answer 2

I use geany (9mb ide + with GCC and g++ it will be almost 70mb)
or gedit (300kb ide + with GCC almost 61mb)

Answer 3

Also, you might want to take a look at Emacs, which is a fully customizable text editor for Windows and Linux. The thing is, it might take you a week before you've set it up but it really has its perks. There are 3 versions: Windows native, Windows cygwin and Linux but I couldn't make the first two work as I wanted. The linux one is kickass.