GNU nano is my editor of choice

  emacs --daemon

Then connect with emacsclient. You can also name the daemon which lets you have specific configurations for specific tasks. At that point, launching emacs for quick stuff is very fast.

So I have a question and I'd like to understand if possible.

To me programming isn't text editing. Granted, we use text to write most code outside of say Pike but effectively most programming is working with symbols right? Like .subst is meaningless as an operation on a string but .substring(0, 1) is meaningful.

So I don't really get the advantage of such, to my mind, rudimentary text editors. At a minimum surely being given contextual information about the symbols you are working with (type, fields, methods, etc) is helpful? Perhaps there are languages or domains that are better suited? I can see that there's not much difference between an ide and editor for new languages but why do people prefer text editing and prioritize typing speed where IDEs exist? Does an editor create a sort of flow or deeper state since lack of tooling requires deeper mental context?

Quite impressive.

I actually don’t use nano though only because it’s not always there. I learned a long time to pick a narrow subset of ubiquitous tools to know really well, compose those and leave it at that. If I’m dumped in single user mode somewhere with no network, or on a system I don’t have the ability to install packages on, a usable vi implementation is always available.

Going back a couple of decades a colleague was stuck on a Solaris box because he needed pico installed and Miss root was off sick. He learned vi that day.

Incidentally I used to embarrassingly suck at vi until I completely hosed a couple of systems.

It's not about the editor: it's about the combination of other tools. Simple text editors invite you to use specific tools for specific tasks that an IDE aggregates and configures for you.

An IDE is usually good enough, but for some environments, having total control of your tooling can give you big productivity boosts. And not every software depends upon lines and lines of code. Sometimes, you will write useful software that's only a couple hundred lines, but required you hundreds of hours thinking about the problem :)

>Hopefully this post demonstrates that nano is a quite capable editor in its own right.

This post showed how to add a slightly enhanced minibar, remove the help and add syntax highlighting. It would be more important for me how to quickly navigate text.