I was old enough back then that I remember actually paying for the shareware version of FrexxEd [1]. I just learned from that page that it's open source now, cool!

[1]: https://daniel.haxx.se/opensource.html (yes, by the author of curl).

CygnusEd was the absolute business back in the day. I still love it, but my muscle memory just isn't there anymore after years of PC/Mac editors! I guess I've also become too spoiled by modern conveniences. LiteXL runs on pretty much anything and writing extensions is also pretty easy. But maybe I should get back into the habit of using CygnusEd some more...

CygnusEd was first released in 1987. I don't think it's fair to compare with a modern editor that was released 30+ years later.

I have not used either [1], but their choice was based on what was available at the time.

Edit: [1] Actually I did use CygnusEd for simple text editing, but I was not into programming at the time. I don't have a basis to compare it to modern editors, other than the knowledge that choices needs to be seen in the proper context.