I've been using nixes since the late 90s and just...never liked emacs or vi. joe is the editor that always felt intuitive to me.

If I remember correctly, this was also the default editor in the early SuSE distributions or early Slackware. Joe is also used by Bisqwit (https://github.com/bisqwit/that_editor).

All my server deployment scripts build joe from source -- partner can't function without it. ;)

I've been using joe since the 90s. One time I was helping someone with their computer and they used WordStar, so I knew the keybindings pretty much for free.