Nano is currently my default text editor. I’m drawn to it in that it is focused and readily configured to operate within a Software Tools model where fairly sophisticated behavior could be defined in the form of calls to external command flows. The source code is very clean and readable, and I’m also likely to ultimately create my own toy version of it to make it a bit more extensible, support personal conventions, and just to play around with technologies.
Emacs is a tool I keep crawling back to. For the time being I’ll be using it as my primary baseline for interactions, but that may be revisited if other pieces start to snap together. In particular I’m currently using the emacs-ng fork.