The "magic" of doublespace / norton utilities, XTree Gold hex-view and other programs amazed my young self.

Well when the target platform only had 512KB ram, or 640K if they could afford it, and a 30MB drive cost $400, you had to squeeze every last bit out of your program.

Norton Utilities were slick. Slicker than any MSDOS tools, or even Apple Dos 3.0 or ProDOS (or ProntoDOS for that matter) utilities for that matter.

I never understood why the beautiful & easy-to-use QBasic Editor never inspired a copycat for linux. It would've easily beaten out nano.

Midnight Commander "mcedit" comes close to the aesthetics (blue background, grey dialogs with shadows, etc.) but is not a perfect copy.

A perfect clone of the MS-DOS editor for UNIX/Linux does not exist. Maybe this is the new toy project for the "written in Rust" crowd.

Joe's Own Editor is a thing since 1988

https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/

Well the one of the appealing part of QBasic Editor was the friendly bright blue color scheme. Along with the always present menu bar on the top. Just a great editor for newbies.

Seems like Joe has the helpful menu system, but it feels overall more "serious" in comparison, especially with the minimal white on black color scheme.

I think that is because back then, terminals weren't capable of handling key combinations like shift-arrows (for selection), ctrl-c (for copy), and mouse support wasn't great either.