I guess I expected this answer. :) Although I hadn't heard of nano. I should probably bite the bullet and start to familiarize myself with emacs or vi since they are so universal. Probably emacs.
My experience with vi involved some physics modeling years ago in undergrad. I recall 'zz'? I never stop forgetting to toggle the input mode. I don't know why. Maybe I am a bit right-brained, but I have a sloppy way of working. Something about vi felt so 'tight', and I prefer a canvas feel. Not really the best mindset for programming, no doubt, but I have learned it's ok to be a bit sloppy and get things done rather than be very neat and unproductive.
For what it's worth, you're not the only one. I haven't gotten the hang of anything but the Windows text box conventions. :)
Pretty much all I want is an editor that loads quickly, shows whitespace, highlights matching parens, and does regex search-and-replace and find-in-files. Usually my choice has been EditPlus, but Notepad++ is a great open-source alternative, and gedit's another good one (although I think I've had to use grep separately with gedit).
I turn to jEdit for editing Unicode documents, NetBeans for editing C/C++, and DrRacket for editing big Racket projects, but those are extremely rare situations for me. Most of the time I avoid all three of them because of how long they take to load; I can almost always get in and out faster with plain Notepad.
> Something about vi felt so 'tight', and I prefer a canvas feel. Not really the best mindset for programming, no doubt, but I have learned it's ok to be a bit sloppy and get things done rather than be very neat and unproductive.
