Aparently nano has syntax highlighting, amazing. If you don’t already know, nano is a GNU replacement for pico. Its more feature rich, as is aparent. It’s the default editor for gentoo.
Personally I prefer vim, which has a very (very) large feature-set. At some point I will post my vimrc, which is setup for my crazy cross platform needs (linux, freebsd, osx, win). There was a period when I used xemacs, and before that lucid emacs. Xemacs is large and can do an amazing number of things (minesweeper comes to mind), though vim’s relativly svelt functionality won me over.