Windows-style, terminal based, text editor for linux

Have a look at the Sanos editor:

http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/editor.htm

Only a 28k binary can do what all those other editors try to -- and fail.

It does exactly what the OP asked for:

Shift+arrows to highlight text

Ctrl-X,C,V for cut/copy/paste

You can also have several open files simultaneously, and "pipe" commands into it. For example, press Ctrl-P and at the prompt enter:

cat yourfile

and it will insert yourfile at the position of the cursor. This way the full power of the bash commands are at your disposal ( use grep to get only specific parts of the file inserted ).

I did a search for the same thing recently. There are several (see JumpingPA's list, plus, 'joe'). Joe or jed are good choices for a no-nonsense simple editor that does more than nano. Diakonos is under active development, and is aiming at users exactly like yourself, but has higher than normal dependencies (Ruby), which not everyone would be able to install on their hosts.

An entirely different solution, which might work depending on your setup is to use a Windows text editor with the ability to edit files remotely. Notepad++, for example, has an FTP plugin, and several Windows IDE's have such functionality. The advantage is that you don't have to install anything on the web host, and you can edit in a full GUI.

Hope that helps.

As I just noted in another answer, you're looking for TUI (Text-based User Interface) text editors that adhere to the CUA (Common User Access) conventions. See the other answer for a full discussion. Then note that some (almost) CUA TUI text editors are still available as Linux/Unix TUI programs, including ones built upon Turbo Vision (which is close to, but not quite, CUA) such as SET's Editor.