Emacs can be installed on any server (and can be used to edit files on any server, from a client …), and it has smooth fonts and scrolling (if you like that; I turn off the scrollbar). And of course it excels at mouseless editing, navigation & automation.

https://github.com/zk-phi/sublimity might be useful to you, too.

I use emacs with vim emulation (evil mode) and am addicted to it, partly because I can bind vim's leader key with emacs lisp functions that can be quite complex, to do great things with a single key press while editing.

and the war begins

Emacs needs to be installed. Vi is already installed most of the time.

Especially on embedded devices there is often no real competition to vi.

The question is how much time you spend editing files on embedded devices versus how much time you spend editing files on your main development machine.

You can always setup automatic process of synchronization of files that you need to edit, so editing process will be most efficient.

If you have ssh access to the remote machine (goes with most methods of automatic synchronization) then you can use TRAMP mode to directly edit the remote copy.

I test different configurations on the target before syncing the right one into my build environment. If I mounted the RootFS via NFS then its possible to use ${EDITOR}, but thats not always the case.

> Vi is already installed most of the time.

60% of the time, it works every time, eh? :-)

I use vi too, but less now than I used too. It's definitely a powerful little editor.

Interesting is logging into UNIX servers like HP-UX and friends and getting the real VI, not the improved ones.

vim supports scrolling [1] and smooth fonts (in modern terminals)...

[1] https://github.com/apinstein/dotfiles/blob/master/vimrc#L162...