What's your reasoning behind needing it to be a default install? seems an odd requirement for an editor.

For instance, notepad is default on windows, and I'll use that when needed on vanilla windows machines, but for the 99% of my editor needs I install and customize a number of enviroments (including Vim). I don't mind whether it's installed by default or not.

I am guessing he works at a place that has a lot of servers that he connects to, and he wants to be able to use his editor on whatever server he is on.

I know this is an issue where I work. We have 40 thousand plus servers, and we aren't going to have everyone install their editor of choice on all those machines. If I have an issue I need to check on a server that requires some text editing, I have to use one of the default editors.

This is the appeal of sshfs - to be able to easily mount remote filesystems and use local tools against them.

One of the best tools I have used with something like this is emacs's tramp-mode. It just works when you connect to another host.

Yeah, but sshfs has been working pretty slow to me.

There is actually this neat hack you can use(if you use VIM) with rsync.

https://github.com/IvRRimum/rsync-vim

I know it's kind of Hacky, but the performance improvement is worth it IMO.

As the other poster guessed, vi is there on any system I log into that runs some form of Unix, including switch hardware.

Even emacs is not installed by default on most operating systems. Even worse a lot of people customize their emacs setup so much that using the default setting can be painful.

I use tramp-mode to connect to remote systems, which provides comfortable editing without requiring anything other than ssh access to the target machine. It’s quite nice.

A emacs-tiny would be nice. Emacs package is just too large to be a default. On servers I usually just install mg/zile/jed.

> On servers I usually just install mg/zile/jed.

I normally just use TRAMP. For those who've not used it, it's an incredible little emacs package which gives one a very Plan-9-esque feeling, in the sense that all the different systems one connects to feel like one whole.

As an example, when one is editing a remote file shell-command runs commands on the remote system, and of course find-file and friends work exactly like normal — only looking at files on the remote system.

I have always, always, always gone back to vim. Fast, efficient, clean, portable, heavily-featured, strongly customizable. It's trivial to call shell commands or inline python code generation.

I glanced over much of the presentation, and none of it was about the editor itself as a user would see it. I'm impressed and glad for the technical investment, but to be even a consideration for a replacement, I need a focus on how it's supposed to be an improvement, not just a substitute, for vim.

Personally, if I'm willing to copy my vimrc over to some machine I'm logged in to, I'm willing to copy a couple meg binary as well.

If i'm understanding things correctly you could write a vi/vim compatible frontend for xi so you get the benefits while not losing the functionality or muscle memory when not using xi.