Back in 1988 I was using three editors on a daily basis. One for the bulk of my editing, one for regular expressions, and one for large files (memory maps mainly). I had access to an unused Unix workstation so I started writing an Emacs like editor I called Zedit.

Once it was usable under Unix, I ported it to DOS and it became my only editor.

The DOS version became fairly full-featured. In 1990 I joined Toolsmiths and switched to Sun computers. Zedit grew and a raw X11 version and later a slightly better looking version where created.

In 1996 I joined Pika and didn't have the energy to port Zedit to Windows NT, so it languished. I switched to GNU Emacs and then XEmacs.

But it has morphed back into a nice little terminal only editor to use for those quick edits of config files. Or for low powered machines.

The program is called Zedit, but the executable was always z. I liked the fact that if you say z the British/Canadian way (zed not zee) it has the word ed in it but only needs one letter.