A note on terminology; neither LibreOffice Writer, Microsoft Word or Abiword are text editors; they are word processors. Examples of text editors are pico/nano, Notepad, Mousepad, Vi/Vim, Emacs. One thing that tends to set a word processor apart from a text editor is the ability to set various types of formatting within a document, and have that formatting preserved across save/open cycles. Such formatting is typically not supported by pure text encodings, so requires some kind of document format support.

Editors with support for, for example, Markdown rendering, sort of straddle the boundary between the two in this regard, but are still typically considered text editors rather than word processors because they still work with plain text, and just have features built into them that make some text more plain than other text.

There is nothing wrong with looking for a lightweight word processor, but to reduce the risk of confusion, it's probably best to not call it a text editor.

Canina‭ Thanks for bringing this up. I'd say word processor is a subcategory of text editors, since both can edit (pure) text. But I agree that the question seeks a word processor, since it's about coloring words. Edited.