>>43 I agree; that's why (even for it's limits) I like 'trolling' the vi/emacs discussions by sticking up for nano.
In all seriousness both emacs AND vi are dated and retarded given what we know now about what makes a good UI and what we have available. vi WAS great for it's day, but its' day was 25 years ago.
The only arguments for either emacs or vi is the power user angle. But niether one can do WYSIWYG word processing, and as far as development enviroments go there are much better (eg visual studio).
If you're just editing text files, you don't need all the arcana of vi/emacs; if you want WYSIWYG word processing neither vi/emacs will cut it; if you want a development enviroment, they can be shoe-horned into working as one; but there are far, far better ones out there which take advantage of modern UI techniques.