Is the original version available without antialiased text and Unicode? Both are features I specifically do not want.
(However, the X locale features are not made very well; they could have been done better (for example, it should not require the C library locale to match the X windows locale, but it does, which can cause some locales to not work, as well as other problems; there is also the bug in Xlib (and problems with the distribution) that requires it to be compiled differently for some locales than other locales).)
Nedit is packaged in most distros.
Why do you not want those features? What is your use case?
My preferred text editor going back to the IRIX days of nedit.
Yes, loved nedit around the turn of the century. At some point I moved to geany, later combined with micro.