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Comment by rounce | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of Vim's current popularity stems from EDITOR=vim by default on many distros, despite often having emacs and always including nano. Even over a decade ago when I was in my early teens this seemed pretty common.

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I believe EDITOR=vim in turn stems from vim being able to run in restricted mode.

I once saw a hardcore emacs user forced to use vim because he was building a setup that allowed shell users to edit a file. And couldn't do that in emacs. So he had to use rvim -y.

I myself once built a nethack shell server where I used rvim to allow users to edit their nethackrc.

So distros preferring vim can either stem from it being vi-compatible which is POSIX. And/or from having a restricted mode.

To be honest I've seen very few linux machines with emacs preinstalled, nano seems to be part of the ubuntu default install (maybe debian too?) but isn't on any fedora box I have immediate access too (it is available in the repos). This might be because I mainly deal in servers with smaller installs than most desktops.

I would entirely agree that a lot of vims popularity lies in it being part of the default install on pretty much every unix box ever though. That and it actually being a decent editor once you get over that initial insert mode/command mode learning curve.

Because, of course ...

* http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/vi...

There is a whole history of why emacs is not likewise in the SUS, already related long since by other people.

Definitely a part of it, I’m an emacs user but I’ve been on enough machines that only have vi(m) and that I just need to make a quick edit on that I’ve had to learn the basics of vi anyway.

I believe vim is a lot smaller, so for many cd-images it is easier to find the space to include it.

The quickes way to validate this believe was to look for the Ubuntu package sizes (look at the size (installed)):

https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/vim-nox

https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/emacs25-nox

I’m not sure if that’s actually true...vim has a hard dependency on ‘vim-runtime’ which is actually pretty big (28mb)

You are right the dependencies probably have a larger impact, but notice that emacs has a similar package emacs25-common (65mb) in its dependecy tree.

Not counting system libraries, "vim-tiny" is about 2 MB: https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/vim-tiny

Vim by default reminds me of organ donors. In countries where people are considered organ donors by default and have the option to opt-out, organ donor stats increase dramatically.

https://www.cesifo-group.de/DocDL/dice-report-2016-4-li-niko...

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