linuxmemes

Nano/micro are great for people who need a terminal text editor but don't want to learn anything to use it.

If you do want to put some time into learning, it really doesn't take long to get to a point of base competency in emacs or vim -- less than an hour for sure to just be able to move around in the document and have a basic understanding of the editing controls.

Both are hugely deep systems that you can keep learning for years, but only at the pace that you need; most tasks can be accomplished pretty easily with a bunch of inputs, but there's usually a much faster way if you know the shortcuts.

As for the difference, vim is more modal -- you switch to editing mode, do some editing, then switch to typing mode and type. Most commands are one to three sequential button presses. For some more exotic functionality you use the command line to type a command, which has auto-complete.

On the other hand emacs is chorded, meaning you use multiple simultaneous keys to do functions, usually a modifier key like ctrl + something else. This gives you more direct power while actually typing, but IMO has a big steeper of a learning curve, and I just personally don't love the chorded inputs, I think they're more work to input than the sequences in vim. But either editor will give you unprecedented power over text with minimal fuss.

I personally use Helix, which is basically just a slightly different take on Vim, as well as taking inspiration from Kakoune which is another competitor. It's got really nice modern defaults and I like the way that Kakoune treats selections in contrast to Vim.