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One of the reasons it's better is that it's slim and you can find it on just about every linux box in the world. Stuck in Borneo with a linux box the local tribe has that not yet connected to the world until you create a script or edit some net config files? Vi is your tool. Emacs? Nowhere to be found.

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Isn't vi being superceded by Nano in that regard? It's more or less become the default editor and I suspect that there are now distros that don't ship vi but do ship nano.

I rely on pico/nano for all my system administration tasks (but then again, I spent the late eighties/early nineties dealing with MS-DOS' EDIT.COM, so maybe I'm not a noble example a thoroughbred greybeard would want to be associated with).

Vi is part of POSIX standard so if your OS is POSIX compliant it should include vi. http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/

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