This is probably misunderstanding the demographic, but why does he suggest using nano over vim?
More likely, if this is meant to be a gentle introduction to the command line, vim is a pretty scary place. Nano works much more like a "normal" text editor.
are there others life-saving useful as these?
:%s/foo/bar/gc
The "gc" will apply the find and replace globally, and ask for confirmation before changing an occurrence of "foo".