Long-time readers will know that I'm a vim man myself, but when I first started using Unix all those years ago, I used Pico, a simple simple simple text editor. Yes, Pico is designed to be easy to use, but there are still some tricks 'n tips you can learn, as a quick look at "Using the PICO Editor in Linux" will show you. Show it to your *nix noob friend.
(Check out all of my posts on vim.)
