Nano is a simple text editor that does justice to its name. It has a good feature set and is keyboard-oriented. Having said that its good to know few commands that will surely come handy at hard times (when you are editing files remotely or stuck with a system that has only command line apps). I personally feel that it is easy to use and n00b-friendly (Yeah, I can hear you, vim is good and it the most capable one out there!!)
Now coming to a cool search feature,
_ctrl + w _lets you search for a term/phrase
alt + w lets you search for the most recently searched term/phrase (you are by the way guided through the search results)