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At first I was going to agree with you, but I think this largely may be an artifact of where and how you started (and me too).

Text-based console editors I think are fundamentally unintuitive and make you learn a lot of different bizarre keystrokes that don't really map onto easy mnemonics or have much actual meaning, so I do kinda wonder if one set is better/worse than another.

I agree. I have found mcedit (midnight commander's editor) comes very close in ease of use and has a lot of power user features. Vim snobs will turn their noses at it, but I find it very comfortable to use for editing code. It is my main editor.

My favorite MS-DOS editor back in the day was Q.