When I learned linux and dug deeper into programming mcedit was my tool of choice and I used it a fairly bit until I discovered emacs and took some very painfull and time consuming approaches to get into emacs. (Partly I was offline and the nature of a self documenting OS and text editor was novel for me and so enlightening.

Later I tried to get better and standard terminal stuff and abandoned mc from my system so i couldnt cheat around. These day, my GF uses mc sometimes to get very basic things done.