Most people have a favorite editor already; you have an "uphill battle" 
if you think that one editor can replace the rest.  Here are some 
comments on your feature list:

- 8088 class machines should be supported.  There is nothing in the 
80286 or 80386 opcode set that should be required for a good editor, 
unless you are going to use large amounts of memory and need DOS 
extender support.  Once again, 8088 class machines are not just in use 
by "museum staff".  There are a large number of hobby systems out there.

- If you think a good editor can not be written in C, then I think you 
should get more experience working in C.  Entire operating systems and 
complex applications are written in C, and have been for decades now.  
Nobody really cares what language you use, as long as it works.

- An editor should be small enough to run on a 128K machine.  The 
executable size should be small too for use from a floppy disk. This is 
important when doing maintenance and a hard drive is temporarily 
unavailable.

- Calculator?  How many people do not have a physical calculator or cell 
phone laying around nearby?

- Font support - whatever you can get from the DOS codepage support 
would be acceptable.

- Editors do not need interpreted languages in them.  (EMACs users, 
please forgive me.)

- An editor should be smart enough to page in parts of the file as it 
needs to from disk.  This enables editing of files that are larger than 
the memory size.

- An editor should have "journalling" to help recover the lost work if 
the machine crashes while editing.  This is normally done by recording 
the keystrokes to a separate temporary file and flushing them to disk 
periodically.  In the event of a crash the journal file can be replayed 
to restore most of the edits, and hopefully not cause another crash 
because of a bug in the editor.

- Undo support.

- The ability to convert tabs to whitespace and vice-versa.

- A pop-up on-screen ruler.

- Regular expression support for searching through text.

- A hexadecimal display mode.


And I'm sure that other people have many other good ideas ...


Mike


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