xedit

Chris Peterson at the MIT X Consortium wrote xedit as a thin shell around the Athena Text widget: a command bar with Quit, Save and Load, a message window that doubles as a scratch pad, a filename line and the editing area itself. The key bindings are Emacs-like because the Text widget's are. In its original form it was a program for showing that the widget worked, rather than something anyone chose on purpose.

That changed when Paulo César Pereira de Andrade took over maintenance for XFree86 around 2000 and extended xedit with multiple buffers, syntax highlighting, spell checking through ispell and, most unexpectedly, its own Lisp interpreter for configuration and extensions, in obvious homage to Emacs. The result is an editor with more features than anyone discovers, in a package almost nobody launches except by accident.