I initially thought you were speaking of CPU/ram efficiency until you threw in vscode, so I think you mean developer efficiency. Vi/vim is what you're accustomed to. I've worked with nano since it came out, I think 2004-5ish. I have no idea what I used prior to that, probably vi.
But I am MUCH faster and more efficient with nano than I am vi/vim/emacs. My text editor of choice is like my IDE of choice, it shouldn't be a problem at all for anyone to just accept that I'm getting my work done in a different application.
I'm more in the Vim camp myself, but suspect that those who use nano for longer programming sessions do so using a well-crafted nanorc. Nano does support some "modern" features like syntax highlighting, it's turned just off by default. (As far as I know, you won't be getting stuff like LSP and multiple cursors though.)
Can I? I opened https://www.vim.org/docs.php but something bad happened to it and it displays in microscopic font for me.
After an hour wading through the docs I found a mention of evim:
---
This manual is about using Vim in the normal way. There is an
alternative called "evim" (easy Vim). This is still Vim, but used in
a way that resembles a click-and-type editor like Notepad. It always
stays in Insert mode, thus it feels very different. It is not
explained in the user manual, since it should be mostly self
explanatory. See |evim-keys| for details.
I don't know how much you actually care, and I'm the nano OP of this comment chain/thread but there are some vims (and emacs) with plugins and what not built in. Only one I can think of off the top of my head is https://spacevim.org/ but theres a bunch.
If you are interested they might give you a good start.
