The best description I can think of is it's DOS edit done right. The color scheme and character-cell scrollbars and menus are a flashback straight out of 1988. Appearance can be misleading, FTE supports multiple buffers, directory listings, syntax highliting for many languages, automatic parsing of compiler output, and a lot of other goodies that DOS edit lacks. It's not eyecandy, it's not as feature packed as emacs, but it's almost as easy to learn as pico and does much much more. Try it once, and you'll never participate in another vi vs. emacs flamewar again.