I'm confused. The only reason one uses nano is because you ssh'ed into some random machine and you are stuck with whatever is on it. If you got enough bother to install micro or fiddling with the settings of nano you might as well setup something more proper.

I'm a GUI dev/UX/education designer. Nano/pico to me are the only cli editors remotely suitable for ordinary human cognition. I have faint interest in the Emacs ecosystem, but wish it took basic ergonomics into account more seriously. I do understand I could get used to the lack of affordances but life's too short, perhaps. I understand keyboard usage wins you speed but not sure it's worth the general unpleasantness. I suppose I'm in the minority here though.

It is not a human cognition problem. It's a motivation problem. Lack of motivation to take a few minutes to learn a keyboard command that will save you orders of magnitude more time in the future than you spend learning it.

With the GUI version, what do you have to learn in emacs? In gvim, you have to learn how to switch between normal and insert mode, but I can't think of anything else basic that can't be done in the menus.

You can pick a new keyboard shortcut to learn every day or two, or whenever you get tired of digging through menus to use a feature. In a year you'll wonder why the hell you let negative bias/emotion keep you from learning a real editor for so long.

I believe this discussion is a part of a wider cultural gap and differences in understanding. I have been researching these differences for a decade or two now, and would like to understand them better.

That's why I would like to understand where you're coming from.

First, I'd like to verify: Do you think motivation isn't a human cognition problem?

Second, it appears to me you are making a wide array of assumptions about my preferences and my goals, as well as about what I find difficult or easy.

For example, you appear to assume that were I to choose rationality (?, i.e. not carrying "negative bias/emotion") I should value speed over of a host of other qualities of interaction design.

You seem to imply that committing to a specific kind of interesting, but very quaint visual/interaction style, i.e. the interaction constraints of a terminal UI, are a price worth paying for the speed of operation gained. Am I correct that you are implying this?

Keyboard shortcuts are not an exclusive feature of terminal UIs. I have a strong preference for UIs that comply with, for instance, the well-researched heuristics from the field of human-computer interaction. Terminal UIs are generally a lot more challenging to design to comply with them (for general audiences). Also visual hierarchy and a host of other beneficial properties are harder to achieve.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/

Yet, certain types of expert users tend to prefer - in my point of view - extremely arcane UIs, as they fit those users' style of operation.

They do not seem to fit mine. I want to emphasize that these are my current preferences, and you may well be right that I would enjoy the speed of emacs/vim usage. So far though, no one has bothered to sell them to me in a way that I personally would find convincing.

Arcane cursor moving commands have never saved me orders of magnitude more time. They are in fact a quickly forgotten inconvenience.

Now, things like Emmet and the possibility of having hundreds of simultaneous editing cursors, these things really save time, and work in an intuitive editor like SublimeText.

I'm not convinced this is true. I have spent a few weeks getting used to both emacs and vim and did end up going back to an IDE for proper development and nano for small editing. I'm not convinced that those two editors are worth the time investment that they require to be even remotely usable, even for the average software developer.

JOE (Joe's Own Editor)[1] is actually easier to use than nano, and it can emulate other editors (including nano/pico via jpico). It also has mouse support. It is installed by default in Slackware, and is in the package manager for most other OSes.

[1] https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/

Thirding the recommendation for JOE. And as someone who started programming in the '80's, I especially enjoy its WordStar mode which feels like coming home again!

From the screenshots that seems to have fewer, not more, immediately visible affordances tho?

Seconding the recommendation for JOE. It was what I used before I learned vim.

Easy to scp micro or nanorc over with one command.

Or use a local editor and scp the edited file.