I first ran into nano when I gave Gentoo a try. I had to edit a few config files, so I ran vi… no vi. Emacs? No Emacs. Well, shit, what am I supposed to do? So I went back a bit and read more carefully, apparently there was a thing called nano. So I ran that. Ew. It was a clone of an old DOS editor of all things. What kind of lunatic had ported that? Anyway I managed to do my edits with it, added normal editors to the system and was on my way. It was also the last time I used it.