joe
is, IMO, the best of the editors-that-aren't-vi. It's a decent full-featured editor in its own right, rather than a stripped down featureless minimal editor like nano
.
Default key-bindings are WordStar-like which have also been used in many other programs over the years, including the editor in the Borland Turbo Pascal & Turbo C IDEs, should be familiar to many users.
I'm too much of a vi user to use it myself, but I frequently recommend it to people who don't like or want to learn a modal editor like vi, with good results.
Here's the description in the debian package:
Joe, the Joe's Own Editor, has the feel of most PC text editors: the key
sequences are reminiscent of WordStar and Turbo C editors, but the feature
set is much larger than of those. Joe has all of the features a Unix
user should expect: full use of termcap/terminfo, complete VI-style Unix
integration, a powerful configuration file, and regular expression search
system. It also has six help reference cards which are always available,
and an intuitive, simple, and well thought-out user interface.
.
Joe has a great screen update optimization algorithm, multiple windows
(through/between which you can scroll) and lacks the confusing notion of
named buffers. It has command history, TAB expansion in file selection
menus, undo and redo functions, (un)indenting and paragraph formatting,
filtering highlighted blocks through any external Unix command, editing
a pipe into or out of a command, and block move, copy, delete or filter.
.
Through simple QEdit-style configuration files, Joe can be set up to
emulate editors such as Pico and Emacs, along with a complete imitation
of WordStar, and a restricted mode version (lets you edit only the files
specified on the command line). Joe also has a deferred screen update to
handle typeahead, and it ensures that deferral is not bypassed by tty
buffering. It's usable even at 2400 baud, and it will work on any
kind of sane terminal.
It is, AFAIK, packaged for all distros, and source is available at http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/ - the debianised source should compile on Raspian if there isn't already a binary package.
nano
would be close. It wont have the exact same shortcuts but similar shortcuts to do the same operation. or you can create .nanorc and have custom shortcuts – h3rrmiller Oct 3 '12 at 20:02