editing root files

How? Is there a simple text editor in SuSE that will edit root files (like fstab) or will I have to learn VI, or VIM, or emacs? (kate won't work in root, and kword is not recognized.) I used to be able to do this, perhaps with a different distro, years ago. Here again is my complaint that nothing is permitted, and there's no obvious way of changing that. I am the owner of this system, and I have the root password, but I can't seem to modify anything anyway. --doug