looking for the perfect word processor
 

One of the most important programs found on any computer is a text editor / word processor. I'm looking for the perfect one (who isn't). I type in "word processor" followed by a keyword to see what's out there, and nearly all the returns are for Windows. I add "linux" to the search term and get less relevant returns for what i am looking for.

What I am looking for is:

1. Free
2. Can do full screen with black background.
3. Lite weight
4. Spell checking
5. Auto saving / recovery
6. Can open and save .odt .txt and .doc

No other feature matters. I have very simple, but very precise needs.

Here are my reasons for some of these specific features.

Full Black Screen:
Doing a full screen with black background is very important because I am doing this on a laptop, an all white background is murder on the battery because more white= more light= more electrical consumption.

Auto-save / recovery:
When I am doing something I often hyper focus and can't be bothered to constantly manually save. Also, it needs to have a recovery mode in case I need to hold the power button on my laptop when the system locks up (this is actually pretty common).

Can open and save to odt txt doc:
on all my devices, be it windows, linux, android, or fire OS, those are the formats I save to and open. So I want to keep this compatibility.

Lite Weight:
My laptop has 2GB of ram and a slow CPU, thus the less resources this thing uses, the better.

The three word processors I have now take up the following ram:
Libre Office Writer: 143MB
FocusWriter 59MB
Leafpad 20MB

Anything under 90MB is lite weight. LibreOffice is seriously the biggest word processor I'd ever run.

Here, leafpad is very limited in capability. LibreOffice is very feature rich, but too big and I can't make it do black full screen properly.
FocusWriter would be the perfect word processor, but the recovery feature doesn't work. It gives me the option to recover the file, but gives me a blank page after recovery. I can't find any support forum for this software, so this problem won't be fixed any time soon. Such a shame, aside from that one issue, it is my perfect editor.

Add 1 : LibreOffice, Textmaker-Free

Add 3 : Textmaker-Free

Textmaker-Free → "FreeOffice for Linux" Revision 944 | 2018-12-12 →
https://www.freeoffice.com/en/freeoffice-download

Well then, Calligra might be even larger. :)

Abiword, should be a bit smaller, however. How much does it cover your needs?

IMHO there has not been one since M$ quashed WP5.1 (never was free, though).

Software, unless commercial, does what the designers think necessary, and that may not be what you think necessary! Obviously you need a word-processor: you are not going to get odt or doc support with a text-editor. You can try Abiword, but that's a bit basic. I can run LibreOffice on a 32-bit desktop with 1GB, so you shouldn't have too much trouble. If you want to speed things up, get a lighter desktop / window-manager. As for a black screen, I haven't seen one of them since Psion Quill on the QDOS and MSDOS!

I suspect you are going to find nothing that fulfills all your requirements so you may have to prioritize. I agree that LibreOffice is large. However, I think most of that is because of its capabilities and that may be a worthwhile tradeoff. LO should work quite comfortably in 2GB. As to the black background take a look at https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/quest...lor-in-writer/. The instructions there say to go to Tools/Options/Libre Office/Appearance. There you should be able to set both the document and the application backgrounds to black (or any other color). To get what I think you want you would have to set both. Whether it will materially affect battery life I can't say. Whether it will otherwise satisfy your needs I also can't say; you will just have to try it.

As an aside, if memory is a limit have you looked into increasing memory? Memory is not that expensive and even laptops will support more memory unless it has already been upgraded. It is really not that hard to upgrade. The hardest part is getting to the memory. If you are lucky you only have to remove a panel in the back. If you are not so lucky you have to remove the entire back. You can find instructions for most laptops on the net and it is something that can be done by anyone with average abilities who can follow instructions. It does invalidate a warranty, however, so if your laptop is still under warranty I would take it to a professional if you are going to upgrade.