pico is simple and not so old it forces you through alien key-combos, but was designed exclusively as an email composer for the
pine email suite so is hard to install by itself and may have an occasionally-catastrophic 80 columns limitation. Truncating or wrapping scripts would be a very bad thing.
vim is indeed everywhere, so learning at least the rudiments is useful in an emergency. It also has some very powerful regular-expression features.
But if you want an editor designed for keyboards newer than the
ADM3A, I suggest pico's modern successor,
nano. It's a fully independent program bundled with no junky email clients, can be told to never wrap words, has a real regex search/replace, color syntax highlighting, and some nice frills like mouse support but you can use it just like pico. It's increasingly popular in linux circles, and comes with osx by default.