Vi's not too bad. 'i' to edit text. ESC to get out of editing. ':w" to save changes. ":q" to quit. ":wq" to do both. ":q!" to quit without saving. "hjkl" for navigation in case the arrow keys don't work.

That's enough to get by for quick edits. I haven't used vi a ton in my life, but I've managed to remember that much.

Yeah, but you NEED TO KNOW THAT before use it.

With nano, all is straight in the UI. That is powerful, and so obvious.

Why Vim/Emacs not have that?

Emacs comes with extensive built in documentation. At the bottom it says hit C-h C-a which takes you to an about page which has various help links.

The GUI app as a menu bar, a standard gui feature that includes at the far right an entry entitled HELP under which one can find a manual, docs, a tutorial, a FAQ and various other options.

I definitely agree with you that nano is more intuitive and certainly much more beginner-friendly.

Just saying that vi at its most basic level isn't bad at all. The user only has to remember i,esc,:w,:q,:q! for basic editing. That's not much.

But I do agree that it would be nice if vi / vim would simply list those commands when starting the editor for those who have never used it or haven't used it in ages.

Indeed, nano's interface is easily discoverable. Vi(m) gives some hints, and emacs... the tutorial is kinda amazing but takes hours to get through. I can't really imagine a discoverable interface for vim that doesn't take up tons of real estate -- so the alternative is a cheat sheet tacked up next to your monitor

Vim is how much you want to get out of it. I looked at Vim, thought about its value proposition, and decided only to learn the most basic commands from a cheat sheet. That makes it more productive than Nano already.

I know other people who aren't Vim fanatics at all but have occasional work in the terminal, and they too also just learned the most basic Vim commands and have the most basic Vim configurations, if at all.

I don't disagree with you at all and my reply should not be construed as criticism, but I just want to point out how funny the line, "Vim is how much you want to get out of it," is.

Nano is perfect for the casual terminal user, it does its job fine when editing an apache server config file once in a while. But when working on the terminal all day, there's no way around vim, IMO. It's good to memorize some basics (save, quit, search & replace) of vim, because there's always a system where only vi is installed (e.g. ESXi).

vim if you open it without a file has a little blurb that includes common operations like exiting. Hitting Control+c the common hotkey to kill a terminal app in any vim buffer tells you how to exit. Control+z puts it in the background.