Joe is still around, and actually quite usable/performant. If it's invoked as "jstar", it gets even closer to WordStar/TurboPascal keybindings. It can also do "jmacs" which has Emacs keybindings, the default "joe" configuration being something in between.

Does syntax highlighting, incremental search, regexes, and all that pretty fast.

If we're talking old DOS editors, JED actually has a quite decent BRIEF emulation.