This is a good thing. But what does it have to do with whether you use curses or gtk-based programs? In both cases you can use either the mouse (eww) or the keyboard.
I'm not the most representative person for that... I can only suggest gvim ;)
Anyhow, just tried gedit and you can press "^S" to save the file and "^Q" to close the window, which is pretty much all that you need to start editing text files.