Even when it's not available, if vi is available chances are you can ask the administrator nicely to install emacs through a package manager.
I just wish it were easier to use it on my local machine in a terminal but still maintain a GUI version as well.
> I just wish it were easier to use it on my local machine in a terminal but still maintain a GUI version as well.
Emacs? I use a nice GUI build from http://emacsformacosx.com/. It runs great in both the GUI and shell.
emacs -nw> (vi seems to be on every *nix machine without fail).
I tend to uninstall vi and install ed on my machines, it is just enough and about 90% smaller! :)
TRAMP & eshell would help you achieve 100% your local Emacs productivity on remote machines, and 100% smaller (you actually don't need to install anything on remote machine) :-)
I'll fully admit that the configuration and lisp scripts are confusing in emacs. Its almost too configurable. But they are amazingly powerful. Plus emacs has the indispensable (M-x tetris)...
I've looked at Sublime, its a beautiful editor though. It seems to have some good tricks up its sleave as well