I've been very productive with these key bindings. Ctrl+d is forward delete.
There's also a lot of other possibilities with plugins for a given editor, like Vim-style bindings in Sublime.
I haven't yet found any real restrictions in my workflow once I learned some of those.
Take a look at the shortcuts in nano; pretty simple stuff can help a lot. Ctrl + Y = page up. Ctrl + v = page down. Ctrl+x = exit.