Hacker News Reader

It doesn't columnize.

Now hang on: Emacs isn't just "a text editor", it's a Lisp environment which just so happens to have the best text editor as front-end.

Yeah, not sure which is more bloated, Emacs or LibreOffice :-)

LibreOffice.

C-c C-a is quicker, as is C-c C-u to unalign them again.

There are text editors that operate fine on columns. IIRC Emacs and Vim do to an extent.