For the archives:

I managed to get mined running; turns out that compiling that one 
special file ran up against process limits, and tweaking them (ulimit 
-d) made the whole thing work.  Yay?


Rhialtos suggestion of vim sort of worked too.  Unfortunately, thanks to 
that very *special* piece of voodoo called autoconf I ended up with a 
gtk-less install.  (Also unfortunately, it was still vim.)  But at least 
when running in an UTF-8 capable terminal emulator it did seem to do the 
right thing.


mined is still a bit quirky, but it seems extremely capable on the 
language front, so that what' I'll be using for now.  But if anyone has 
suggestions for a "normal" text editor, I'd still be interested.

Thanks.


MAgnus