The most popular graphic text editors on SGIs include:

  IRIX 5.x includes jot, which is very nice. It requires GL, i.e. no
  X-terminals, text terminals or non-SGI machines. See below for a bug
  and workaround. zip is the IRIX 4.x incarnation of jot (the jot which
  comes with IRIX 4.x is something else entirely); FTP it from
  ftp://ftp.sgi.com/graphics/zip/.

  nedit is a straightforward graphical editor with programmers'
  features. It needs X-windows but not GL. Get it from
  ftp://ftp.fnal.gov/pub/nedit/, and see also
  http://www-pat.fnal.gov/nirvana/nedit.html.

  GNU Emacs, a perennial favorite, isn't just an editor; it's a way of
  life.  It has a X-windows mode and works on X-windows terminals as
  well as SGI consoles and text terminals. Its X-windows support, once
  rather lackluster, has improved in the recently released version 19.
  It may be FTPed from any GNU archive, e.g.
  ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/.

  XEmacs (formerly Lucid Emacs) is a derivative of GNU Emacs 19. It has
  subsumed Epoch, another derivative of GNU Emacs. It may be found in
  ftp://cs.uiuc.edu/pub/xemacs/, and it has a WWW page at
  http://xemacs.cs.uiuc.edu/. It works on both text and graphics
  terminals.

  Finally, the comp.windows.x FAQ (at
  ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/comp.windows.x/) lists many more editors
  which run under X-windows, both free and commercial.