Of course you could do your friends a favor and ween them off the Windows narcotic stuphe.

Maybe move them to something nice like Fedora, or Centos. Which could also be used to get them acquainted with the core O/S their nodes run on.

As for me, yes I've used vi (yeeeeaaarrrssss ago under Xenix and SCO Unix). And today I mostly use nano on the command line.

But on my various general use Fedora boxes (including this laptop with Fedora 20) I also use the Dolphin file manager, with links to my nodes (via sftp).

And I find the KWRITE text editor easy to deal with.

Just my opinion.

"Friends don't let friends use Windows"