Palm vs Laptop for Writing

The Palm is so much harder to use for note taking because of its setup time (I use a portable keyboard) and lack of a backlit display, but I like how small it is and how I don't have to worry about the battery drain as much. If only I could make this laptop use as little power as the Palm. Hm, I think I can if I install a very minimal Linux on this laptop. It could avoid accessing the hard drive except for explicit saves. It could run without X to facilitate boot time, although Ion doesn't take much time to load at all. Another benefit would be that I could type in Dvorak. One annoyance is that I won't be able to use metapad, which is for Windows. Vim is not great for prose, its text-wrapping has to be fixed after an edit. Nano doesn't word wrap. Nedit is for X. Anyone know of a lightning fast (to load) word processor for console Linux?