Sounds a lot like emacs, there's a core written in C etc but the overwhelming majority of the bits that make it an editor are in a scripting layer that you can change at runtime (and indeed there's hardly any reason to use emacs if you're not doing so)
No wonder the mutator scene in UT was crazy. My favorite mod for the original UT99 was Dr Strangelove, which modded the Redeemer gun (the one that shoots huge nuclear missiles) to allow you to ride them.