alt Hacker NewsNano is quite a venerable piece of software with the initial implementation shipping as pico, the text editor for the pine mail client, back in 1992. Tens of thousands of students at a few universities will have been introduced to it as their very first email client.
The pine authors fell foul of the Debian free software guidelines and, as well as nano, a clone for the mail client itself lives on to this day as alpine. I use it every so often for a spot of nostalgia.
This is exactly my path to it, and even though I know how to “eat flaming death” vi and used emacs for awhile, nano is still my default “edit that config file quickly”.