Here's an interesting angle, I've tried to find a good programmers editor like DOS BRIEF, and I did not want to use either of emacs or vi :-)

I came up with these:
FTE (the closest to BRIEF I could find)
nedit (simple, easy to add syntax highlighting for
library functions)
snavigator (very similar to TurboC once you get to know it)
If syntax highlighting is all you need, use mc.

Unfortunately, only FTE and MC work in text mode :-(