And by that I mean, can't we all just gang up on nano?
one it is very simple and intuitive
And two, it has the (two? It has been a few years) row footer that literally tells you what buttons to push to save or exit. I didn't know how to exit vim when I first started with git, as is tradition.
I've introduced a few people to Vim and I have to start out with an apology for how annoying it is to close. If the user hammers the Esc key, it should at least flash up with a hint of how to quit.
It does this if you press ctrl-c, so it's not as if it can't be done.
(gVim Easy seems to just be gVim restricted to insert mode. Not sure I see the sense in that - isn't that just Notepad++ but worse?)
If I could change one thing about curl, it would be for -L to be the default behaviour, so that it would just do the right thing regarding redirects. Instead, wget does the right thing by default, but curl always needs the flag.
If they're already comfortable with the command-line, but don't know Vim or Emacs, I'd keep encouraging them to take the dive.
Of course, there's also gVim, so perhaps that's not quite the right way to think about it.
(I'm also fond of Escape Meta Alt Control Shift.)