It was what the little startup I was at used as a minimal editor on the VM images they were baking 10ish years ago. They were all emacs people, so it made sense. One of them is at the FSF last I heard.
“GNU Zile is a lightweight Emacs clone. Zile is short for Zile Is Lossy Emacs. Zile has been written to be as similar as possible to Emacs; every Emacs user should feel at home.” ~ gnu.org/software/zile