micro is surprisingly powerful and has a good chunk of plugins you can use. it's def my favorite and it's really approachable.

an unseasoned barebones window

That'd be because micro doesn't do a window, or at least doesn't need one. It's a terminal text editor, which some people prefer in general, but it can also be used without a graphical environment - like when SSHing into a server or recovering your system if the graphical environment breaks. Or if you're editing critical system configs with sudo and want to do it from tty with a simple editor to minimize points of failure.