There is also dte[1]. It hits exactly the same notch and offers an extremely lean editor with Unicode support, CUA key bindings and much more. It has replaced nano as my terminal editor.
vi isn’t usable. it sucks. but the facts are it’s installed everywhere and you can learn how to use it in 10-15 minutes. easier to patch your ignorance of basic vi than it is to install software on every machine you’ll ever edit on.