After years of attempting and failing hard to grasp Vim or Emacs, I've recently switched to nano and I'm very happy with it.

Vim and Emacs seem impenetrable to someone coming to them after they've been around for so long. Documentation and code is scattered all around, their concepts are not intuitive and there's so much stuff (modules, modes, whatever) available for both that I just feel paralyzed trying to decide what I need and what I don't. And then there's learning all the crazy key combinations and commands.

In contrast, the manpage for nanorc can be read in a few minutes. Keys work as expected and there's a helpful menu at the bottom. Shortcuts are all Ctrl+<something>. It's small, it's fast, and it does what I expect it to do: allow me to painlessly edit text files.